Category archives: Common Scams

In case you’re unfortunate enough to have already installed the PlayVix player, and have thus infected your system with spyware, getting rid of it isn’t so trivial.To make matters worse, other scammers are cashing in on this scam in unexpedted ways.There is a video on YouTube which claims to show you how to remove PlayVix. […]

The scammers are at it agan. If you come across a video file which, on playback, shows you this: Beware! It’s yet another form of the old DivoCodec scam, this time with a new twist. If you’re familiar with the DivoCodec scam, you probably vaguely recognize the screenshot. It’s surprising how predictable these crooks are: […]

You’ve got to hand it to me. For two weeks I’ve had an article about the Divocodec scam on my web site, and absolutely no links or nothing pointing to it; in fact I forgot even to tell anybody about it. How’s that for efficient information flow? In case you encounter an AVI file which […]

I have encountered yet another spawn of the spyware-ridden WinZix installer. The worrisome part is, my antivirus package (AVG from Grisoft) doesn’t find anything harmful inside (although you can bet the farm it’s most decidedly harmful), even with a day-fresh virus DB update. I think this is because the installer is a NET 2.0 binary, […]

Fellow scambuster Jim Dunn has alerted me to a new trend of AVI scammers. If you get an AVI file which shows you this message: This is, off course, just another variation of the 3wPlayer scam. The same people responsible for 3wPlayer scam has added another trick to their bag. They’re double-encoding 3wPlayer files and […]

First of all, apologies for churning out these blog entries at such a snail pace. I had intended to write up the DRM scam sooner, but considered it a fringe thing. Good thing I was slow on the draw with this one, though, because it has proven to be more serious than I thought, and […]

Prior to last week, users encountering ZIX archives have been able to find information on WinZix in Wikipedia. This was an invaluable source of information, and it included warnings about the spyware in WinZix and links to damage reports as well as remedies for those affected. I was able to contribute in a small way […]