Lately Síle and I have taken to spending a lot of time on the computer each morning- being comparatively guestless at this time gives us a bit of leisure in the mornings to catch up on mail and read the papers on line.

To stop the rows over who gets the PC I have taken out the laptop from the cupboard , little used by us except on holiday, so we can each plug away on our own.

On Monday morning when I switched on the laptop it started telling me that I had a virus .
This thing called Spyguard Protection filled the screen telling me I had all sorts of nasty sounding viruses , Trojan was one and there were several worms, who were taking control of my computer and that they had access to all my private files, my bank numbers, my credit card details etc.

If I followed their eradication commands I soon arrived at a moment when I had to subscribe to Spyguard Protection to proceed and then, of course, they wanted money and my credit card details etc.

I have recently re-installed Mc Afee virus protection so I then- suspecting I was being conned-ran a full anti virus scan on the laptop . After about an hour of meticulously checking all my files and stuff Mc Afee declared that I was, in fact clean as a whistle.

Then I began to check out Spyguard Protection on line on my other PC.
It turns out it is in fact a most aggravating scam.
Their methods of getting rid of this nuisance were far to technical for me so Benjamin of my local internet cafe called today and he took the laptop away.
Apparently he will have to take out the hard drive and launder it in a computer which as protection from Spyguard.
Hopefully it’ll be back, good as new in a few days.

Apparently this Spyguard is very clever and can sneak in the back door with something else legit you are downloading.

You have been warned.