Anybody hear of Geek Technical Support? They seemed to know what they were doing, but their business practices were suspicious.

MaryCarolG wrote:

What exactly constitutes a secondary backup? (A second time machine?)

Can they do all this at the Apple Store?

Yes. Time Machine can do that. The hard part is that it requires a second hard drive. The Apple Store does sell those, but you need to have a good backup before you drop off the machine.

This is where you have to balance what you can reasonably do vs. what the scammers might have done and pick something in the middle that you can live with.

MaryCarolG wrote:

What exactly constitutes a secondary backup? (A second time machine?)

Can they do all this at the Apple Store?

Buy an external hard drive that is big enough to hold everything on your hard drive with room to spare. You can then use Time Machine to back up to that drive in addition to whatever other drive it is currently backing up to. Maintain the backups on both drives. Alternately (preferably, in my opinion), you can use a different backup program (such as Carbon Copy Cloner) to back up to the second drive. The advantage to this is that, if Time Machine has some kind of malfunction that affects all your backups, it won't affect that one.

My own personal strategy is to use Time Machine to back up to a Time Capsule, and use Carbon Copy Cloner to back up to two other hard drives. One of those drives is at home, the other in my safe deposit box, and every now and then I swap them. Even if there's a fire or theft or some other catastrophe, I still have the copy at the bank.

The major pain of having a card cancelled is that you have to go to all of your online accounts and wherever else to update them to the new number. But better that than unauthorized purchases showing up.

Logmein is remote access software. That needs to be removed as soon as possible. See http://help.logmein.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/How-do-I-uninstall-LogMeIn-for-Mac-en 1/?q=Uninstall&l=en_US&fs=Search&pn=1

I'd also question this:

com.logmein.hamachimb

see here:

https://secure.logmein.com/products/hamachi/

as well as a couple of other potential entries.

I'd definitely second the recommendation to wipe your drive and reinstall from scratch as there may be other things hidden somewhere. And only use a backup to restore from a date before you were dealing with these scammers.

Have you heard of Egeeks Technical Services?

It started when I received a box that my computer was infected and I had to call the number on the screen to fix it. I called the number and they found what was the problem, did the work and cleaned it in front of me. They charge at $295 for the first year and $195 per year after for protection and offer a refund if they aren't happy. I looked up the website and the payment plans on the website were different from the ones they were offering on the phone. According to the website business hours were 10 AM to 8 AM MST.

I changed some passwords. I don't bank online or have a credit card. I think this could be a scam and I don't think I have paid them yet .

There are hundreds of sites that popup these fake warnings. There are hundreds of topics on these forums alone about them. They are ALL fake messages from scammers who in fact found absolutely nothing on your Mac and charged you a ridiculous amount to money to "fix" nothing.

Since you have no means of paying them (unless you gave them a checking account number or similar), then ignore any other correspondence you get from them.

There's also a very good chance they installed malware on your Mac. Like a keylogger to capture those passwords or other personal info. What you have to do at this point is backup personal info such as your email, photos and such, then erase the drive and restore it to a point before you allowed them access.

If you have no safe backup to restore, then you must backup your personal data, erase the drive and reinstall everything from scratch. Then manually restore your backed up files.

Would they need all three sets of numbers that you see at the bottom of your checks? I called my bank and it doesn't appear that they have got any money out yet.

This will be the first time doing this. Where do I go to erase my drive. Where can I go to back up my personal data and files?

There are two sets of numbers. The first at the bottom left is the routing number. Meaning, this is the bank you do business with. The second is your account number. The last to the right is just a duplicate of the check number at the top right and isn't important.

If you gave the crooks those two numbers, you need to call your bank and stop all transactions on that account NOW!!! Close the account and open a new one. If they have those numbers, they, or someone else will try to empty out your account as fast as possible.

If you gave those scammers your checking account numbers, do as Kurt says immediately, before they clean out all your cash!

Then, do yourself a favor. Get a credit card. Credit cards have fraud protection for this kind of thing. If you're scammed using a credit card and realize it before you've paid the bill, you can have the charge reversed before you've lost any money. However, if you give up your checking account numbers to a scammer and they take money out of your account, you're in a position of trying to fight to get your money back after it's already gone, and that may take some time - during which you have no money to pay your bills - if you ever get it back at all.

🙂