GETTING PROTECTION

Not this:  

Nor this:

But this:

I use CleanMyMac and Malwarebytes on my desktop Mac and the Mac laptop to screen  downloads and to, hopefully, protect the computers from viruses. (The Old Girl uses her work computer which has all sorts of fancy I-Tech protection).

These programmes seem to work OK - at least every time that 'they' run a scan the report comes out something like this:

"Wow! Fantastic man. Cool! Your computer is working just fine. Chill!"

 I'm not sure if this is real or just a way for the young tech guys to assuage the fears of the old Luddites like me. Anyway, it does make me feel a bit better.

The problem is though, that in the email inboxes I get several scams, spams and phishing messages per day. Some are obviously fake but some purport to be from our bank, our insurance company, IRD and many reputable organisations. These are quite sophisticated and you have to be wary of them.

A couple of months ago, when the Norton computer protection yearly subscription came up for renewal I discontinued it. I had this for a non-Mac laptop that I used to use for my contracting work and which has been in a cupboard now for over a year. I thought that discontinuing the Norton service would be easy. Well, I was wrong. In the first month I was receiving about 20 emails a day from Norton at first asking why I hadn't continued with protection, then demanding renewal and later sending quite threatening messages. In the second month the messages are still coming but down to a frequency of once or twice a day. They are still coming in. Looking on-line I see that millions of people are receiving these Norton messages which Norton says are spam. The thing is though - I did not start to receive these until after I decided to discontinue the subscription with Norton. The early emails were in the form of reminders before they became more aggressive and finally spam, scam and phishing. I can't help but think that Norton sends our email link to hackers once they know that we were not going to resubscribe.

Some other very annoying and very frequent spam, scam and phishing emails I get are from Dick Smith's and its owner Kogan. I made the mistake of buying an item from Dick Smith's online a year ago which brought a long wait and a lot of grief and frustration. See: THE DEMISE OF ON-LINE BUYING

Since then we are regularly getting spam and bogus emails from them asking for account verification and trying to offer us crappy deals.

There are many others I could identify and, no doubt there will be many new ones to come. The problems with online buying are:

• It exposes the purchaser to risks that were not there when buying in-store.
• The transaction necessitates sending critical personal and financial information
• The growth of online trading is shrinking traditional in-store trading
• This in turn increases the problems in the first two.

I'm getting a lot of Bitcoin offers and silly phishing scams - some clumsy but others quite sophisticated. This never happened until I made an online purchase from E-Bay.

Trade Me, SPARK, BNZ, ASB, and, as I said earlier, most reputable companies are also at fault for allowing our data to be hijacked. This seems to be never ending and I guess will be just part of the cost of the new trading platform.

A couple of years ago our BNZ credit card was twice hacked and thousands of dollars were fraudulently charged to it. BNZ fixed this but it took time and a lot of inconvenience to put right. I now check the credit card statement details weekly to make sure that no-one is 'dipping'. It's a hassle but - "It is what it is." Scamsters are ruling the world.