I’ll admit it.  I routinely watch Dr. Who and Torchwood via illegal download before they reach US TVs. I’ve gone to a 3:00 showing of a movie and then the 5:30 showing of another without paying again.  I’ve snagged music that a friend offered instead of paying for my own copy. Now, I’m not trying to get absolvence from the fandom for what amounts to petty theft; judge me as you will. On the other hand, I’m trying to save you from the really big screw up.

The day I lost everything in my computer: documents, photos, music…basically everything from 1990-around 2002 lost in the flash of an eye. How did I lose it you might ask? Other people mess up their computers attempting to download free porn. I fry mine on trying to get a free version of Con Te Partiro.  That’s right. I fried my computer losing over a decade’s worth of material because I was too cheap to buy an Andrea Bocelli ballad.  Yes, I am that big of a dork, and I learned my lesson the hard way.

What’s the point in all of this? Well, if you have designs on illegally downloading New Moon, according to USA Today and Yahoo, you might get a lot more than you ever bargained for. According to Yahoo:

“A new Twilight scam making the rounds and exposed by PC Tools, isn’t a whole lot different from the usual M.O., but here’s a primer on how it works.

It all begins with a web search: Users search for “Stephenie Meyer” (a misspelling of the name of the author of the Twilight books) on the web, and find (rather high) in the results a link to a result reading “Stephanie Meyer at 365Multimedia.com,” with the description “Stephenie Meyer interview on Twilight the movie starring Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart.”

Sounds harmless enough, but 365Multimedia.com doesn’t actually host interviews (it’s a desktop background and screensaver website), and the link in question doesn’t actually go there either. Instead, users are directed to a malicious website that takes that age-old scareware path: A pop-up alerts users that they are infected with some sort of malware, and then directs them to a download site so they can get a phony antivirus software product to remedy the issue.

At that point, the user is asked for his credit card number, additional malware is installed on the machine, and Robert Pattinson is nowhere to be found. Now that sucks. (Bites? Pick your own favorite vampire reference…)”