Dear Holly,

I have an anti  virus program on my computer but it says that I have viruses and wants me to pay again for it.  What can I do? I cannot get on the internet to ask them, just their website.

Holly says:

This is a typical request we get often.  Some people have no anti-virus, some have free ones and some have paid ones.  But they see these messages on the screen saying they have a virus and to pay $xx to have it cleaned.

This is called a Fake Antivirus.  A small program was put onto the computer and makes it look like a fake antivirus.  These programs come from infected websites (often legitimate websites and the owners are not aware they are infected).  They can bypass your real antivirus program because they do not look like a virus, do no “damage” to your computer and are made (and stored) similar to legitimate programs you use when you go to some websites.  So the antivirus will not see it as a virus.  Some antivirus programs will see the threat when you click to go through to “pay” for them, but again not all will as it is a simple website asking you to buy something online – just the same as if you bought anything else online.

If you do get one of these fake antiviruses on your computer – DO NOTHING!  Some of them will give you a message with a yes or no answer, or some people will click the X at the top right to close the window.

OFTEN ANY INTERACTION AT ALL WILL ALLOW THE PROGRAM TO SPAWN ITSELF ON YOUR PC MAKING IT WORSE!

The best course of action is to turn off your computer (you should still be able to use a normal shutdown to turn it off – as a very last resort press and hold the power button on the tower for about 10 seconds and it will shut off – this works on a laptop too).

Then take your computer to a reputable computer repair shop and have them remove the offending program.  Before you hand over your computer you should ask them a few questions such as how much will it cost, is it a fixed fee or based on time, what happens if they cannot fix it.

Here at ABC123 IT we do a fixed fee virus removal.  If you are on one of our monitoring packages that comes with anti-virus and you get a fake antivirus we remove it for free, otherwise it is a fixed cost.  We will normally fix the viruses, and have always removed the fake antiviruses.  If it is a real virus that has damaged your computer then we cannot always guarantee that the virus has not affected windows critical files. In which case a reinstall or new install would be necessary – but in our experience that happens less than 2% of the time.