Scammers are trying to trick Windows users into paying to fix bogus hard drive errors that have apparently erased important files, a researcher said today.



From ComputerWorld:

The con is a variant of "scareware," also called "rogueware," software that pretends to be legitimate but actually is just a sales pitch based on spooking users into panicking. Most scareware masquerades as antivirus software.

But Symantec researcher Eoin Ward has found a new kind of scareware that impersonates a hard drive cleanup suite that repairs disk errors and speeds up data access.

  Windows scareware fakes impending drive disaster