NO JOKE - HAD A VISIT FROM A WORM

The Dow Jones went up 50%...HAPPY APRIL FOOLS DAY! That's a joke! It wasn't funny when I couldn't stop a pop-up that screamed my computed was infected with worms and viruses, that I picked up on my daily visit to myspace.com the other day.

Warnings abound - "this could happen to you " when it happened, at first i didn't get it. The pop-up was a security system warning report that showed that I had multiple viruses and worms. It had a Microsoft page top - it seemed to be a Microsoft product. I thought it was legit. It asked me if I wanted to erase or quarantine the nasty critters, I clicked the button and was sent to a MasterCard-Visa screen to pay for the security program.

Then I realized that I was a victim. So, found the program in my "programs" on "My Computer", and deleted it. Then I deleted the icon it had put on my desktop. And figured, that was that. Wrong! It continued the pop-ups indicating multiple viruses and worms infected my computer. The little icon on the right-bottom of my desktop would not go away.

Now I am starting to panic...so, I went to the Cox Free McAfee spy-ware program and set it to the "big" scan...and should have gone to sleep 'cause this process took over six hours and it was worth every minute. McAfee indicated that I was"clean" and since I'm a bit paranoid, I set my Ad-Aware program scanning till that showed I was virus free.

After a while, the bad-guy-security-system-small icon - on the bottom right of my desktop screen disappeared and I vowed never to travel the Internet carelessly. I will read the http:// address atop the page top be sure it's the address i entered. That was the problem with myspace.com.

I realized that I had myspace.com in my "favorites" and did an automatic click and didn't pay attention when I noted the different address - just goofed it off. What a blunder! The address I was sent to wasn't myspace.com - It was ca.myspace.com.

Under the impression that my computer would let me know I had serious problems by crashing, I wasn't on top of watching for slowdowns, pop-ups that won't go away, being sent to sites I did not intend to visit and noting search results that were not normal. Well, it's APRIL FOOL'S DAY and although every one's playing tricks today - this is for-real - and , I'm not laughing.