Scammed

Woke up early for me (9.05 Spanish time) after late night because james just was not for settling to sleep.

Shortly afterwards, mum's phone started ringing and it hasn't stopped all day. The reason being, that most people in her email contacts had received an email this morning, from her email address, saying that she was stuck in west Africa, with no passport and no money....you know the rest!

It seems that someone has hacked into her email account - to the point that we can't access it at all, as her security question has been re-set by the evil git in question.

My brother is a devious bugger and replied to the email pretending that he didn't know - asking where to send money to - he then found the IP address that the mail was sent from and then did a bit of internet investigation to discover that the email is part of a known nigerian internet scam.

A number of phonecalls between me and my brother ensued - resulting in me spending 5 hours today in front of mums PC doing a full system clean, - 170 pieces of spyware, 20 pieces of malware, seriously fragmented hard disk etc etc. New email has been set up.

And a repeated conversations about password security!!!!

As a result, I developed a real stonker of a stress headache around 3pm, and had to go to bed. But I was that tense, I was really grinding my teeth - have had 4 hours in bed, with gum shield in, and since having something to eat and drinking another couple of litres of water, I am feeling better.

And have spent the last 90 minutes running the same system checks on my laptop to make sure that mine isn't full of evil stuff.

Phone guy coming round tomorrow to ensure that mums internet connection is secure - I will be having words as it hasn't really been set up properly.

And then hopefully my holiday can start properly then.

The picture - one of the sets of steps on the pool has been out of action. Its was fixed this evening - in the manner of all good fixing work - it was a one man job, with the necessary 2 onlookers. Do you like the hands on hips?!?!?!