The Null Device

PC user loses $20m to virus conspiracy

A couple in New York are charged with defrauding a wealthy musician of somewhere between $6m and $20m after he asked them to remove a virus from his laptop. Vickram Bedi and Helga Invarsdottir, who operated a computer shop, allegedly discovered, upon learning of their client, pianist and PC user Roger Davidson's wealth (and possibly other things; perhaps his browsing history revealed a propensity for fantastic stories and/or conspiracy theories?), that the virus on his laptop was merely the tip of a vast, sinister conspiracy against him by intelligence agencies, foreign nationals and the shadowy Catholic sect Opus Dei (best known as the villains in a Dan Brown novel), and then offered him "24-hour protection" against the threats for the low, low price of $160,000 (a bargain for protection against the arrayed forces of evil itself, I'm sure you'll agree). Anyway, Bedi an Invarsdottir apparently managed to convince Davidson so well that he paid up, and kept paying for some six years.

There are 1 comments on "PC user loses $20m to virus conspiracy":

Posted by: Greg Thu Nov 11 12:03:23 2010

For that kind of money per week to protect a laptop, you could just about skip the middleman and replace the laptop itself with people. I mean, pay someone to take dictation (of music scores?), deliver messages, fetch newspapers and videos and so on.