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Scammers Target Neopets Users
An anonymous reader writes "If you have children that play on the popular virtual world game Neopets, you might want to warn them of a social engineering scam gleefully targeting 12-year-old kids. Neopets users looking for rare items are sent private messages from the scammers, who direct them to sites hosting keyloggers & trojans. They then use the infected PC as a means to get to data the parents might have stored there, be it credit card details, Paypal accounts or online banking. Seeing the screenshots of some of these people talking about putting these children into botnets is just unbelievable — if ever you wanted proof that people up to no good online will go to any lengths to get their hands on some money (or even just feel good about outsmarting a 12-year-old), here it is."
Jeeze, all scammers are scum of the earth. Why would you expect them to be any different with 12 yo kids?
[John]
Shit better not happen!
I'm no parent
What you do, then, is you print out your post, and save it in a safe place. Then, read it again, on your first child's 9th birthday, and realize what an ass you sounded like in your callow youth. It's very humbling, and good for the soul. When I first started posting on Usenet in 1991, before I had children, I wrote some incredibly stupid and glib things about parents and parenting. I ran across a box filled with print-outs from that era about six months ago (yes, I did print out my Usenet posts... I was in love with the sound of my own voice way back then too) and was startled by my trite ignorance. I am trying to learn from that experience in lots of ways, but it's a wisdom only painfully won.