I've had various friends hit like bopper and none of them are stupid people. As well as the MS scam, some fell foul of the scammers pretending to be the persons ISP. Especially Talk-Talk which had a whole bunch of account numbers stolen.

Also interesting is how the scammers are changing tactics. Instead of trying to max out the victims card, I've seen it where the scammer setups a "Recurring Visa Transaction", also called a "Continuous Payment Authority". Whats clever here is the amounts are not that high, something like 19.99 a month, an amount that many people would miss.

Until recently, it was a real struggle to get many UK banks to cancel such things. Main excuse was only the company could cancel the transaction. Or recurring transactions are linked to the bank account not the card.

The other thing to note is what the scammers do to a machine once they get access. Not just the obvious like disabling AV/security, but also damaging the registry. They do that so you can't run things like regedit, change any windows security settings and make sure system restore won't work. Even if you go into safe-mode the damage is really severe and usually the safest bet is backup data (they don't usually touch that) hard format the machine and reinstall everything from scratch.

Pinky - you left the lens cap of your mind on again.