Illinois Couple Loses $30,000 After A Visit To A Porn Website

It's no secret that adult websites, also known as porn sites, can be very dangerous places to scroll and click your way through, especially with the amount of online scammers out there looking to steal identification information and money at any chance that they're given. This is just one of many ways you could find yourself getting scammed:

News18.com:

According to a recent report, people on porn sites are being met with a fake pop-up that warns users that their “browser has been locked" for watching porn videos. A security researcher has alerted people about this scam, further sharing a screenshot of a suspicious URL resulting in a full-page pop-up on a Google Chrome browser.

This Sort Of Thing May Have Been What Recently Happened To A Western Springs, Illinois Couple

According to Patch.com, the story unfolded on Valentine's Day when a woman reached out to Western Springs police about her husband being scammed out of some money online. She went on to tell them that a pop-up had appeared on her husband's computer screen telling him that he needed to contact support at Microsoft:

She said he told her that he was browsing a pornographic site a couple of days earlier, which he believed may have caused a virus to download on the computer without his knowledge, police said.

The couple then contacted the phone number provided on the computer screen. That led to phone conversations that lasted for hours in which the couple followed instructions given to them, police said.

Needless to say, they weren't talking to Microsoft.

This Story Shows That When Someone Asks For Payment In Gift Cards, You Should Be Aware That You're Dealing With A Scammer

Dennis Horton, director of the Rockford Regional Office of the Better Business Bureau (BBB), has pointed out time and time again that one of the scam artist's preferred methods of getting money from their victims is to tell the victim to go out and buy gift cards, then read the numbers off of the activated gift cards to the scammer over the phone.

That's one of several things that happened to the Western Springs couple, in addition to depositing over $18,000 in cash in a scammer's bank account, according to Patch.com:

During at least two visits to Home Depot in Countryside, the couple took out $11,500 in gift cards, police said. The gift card information was provided to the strangers.

Additionally, they went to Walmart in Hodgkins to buy a $500 Walmart MoneyCard and give the information to the suspects, police said. Police said they advised the woman to monitor her finances going forward and told her to contact them if issues persist.