From commander.com, welcome to the Tech Refresh podcast, where we scour the internet to feature just the right digital news, gadget stories to keep you up to date.

Our promise is you give us about 30 minutes, and we'll make sure you're the in the know-go-to digital source for your friends and family.

After an exhaustive nationwide search to find the right digitally savvy show host,

they gave up and they couldn't pay them enough so you got me. I'm Mike James along with our

distinguished panelist, Ali Seligman. Welcome, Ali. Hello, Mike. And we've got the wise one,

Obi-Wan, Ben Bradley. Welcome, Ben. Always a pleasure, Mike. And we've got a ton of

stuff to get to later on, our scam of the week. As people are back home and they need

companionship, they're seeking furry little friends, and ah, they're getting scammed. What a bummer.

They have absolutely no shame. And in a few minutes, we also have brand new or not true. It's back. We'll have two real products. Ben has the products this week. And let's start with the news. Allie, think twice before you search for a company a second, you can see the red flags. This one, though,

is a little bit different. The red flags aren't there until you're already kind of in it.

Okay, here's what happens. So people were looking for Home Depot, and like we do, because

we're a little lazy or maybe we just don't know the URL, you do a Google search. So people

were searching Home Depot. And the first result was a paid ad that looked

like it was just from Home Depot to go to the Home Depot site. If you hovered over it, the URL said Home Depot,

but it was a malicious ad. If you clicked on it, you would get redirected through a bunch of ad services

and eventually land on a tech support scam site. At that point, it kind of

took over people's computers. You got this security warning, and it kept opening the print

dialogue box, and so you couldn't close it. Eventually, you would get a pop-up saying, call this number,

and we can help you. If you call the number, surprise, surprise, it's someone who wants to remote

into your computer and lock it. And then, of course, you have to pay to get it unlocked.

Makes it even trickier, too, because this one was really hard to spot in the wild. The ad only

redirected to the scam at once every 24 hours, so it was really hard to pin down. The bottom line here is don't

...