Scam Computer Problem Phone Calls
I had read about this scam in the week and then I was amazed to receive the very same phone call yesterday. Rather than put the phone straight down, I played along for a few minutes!
Firstly the caller asked me if I was Mr Thompson. When I told him that I wasn’t, he just confirmed that I was the owner of the phone line and then introduced himself as someone giving free computer help. It was made out to be a pretty ordinary service.
After making sure I was sitting in front of the computer he got me to right click on My Computer and select Manage, then to find Event View.
He then got me to count all of the error and warning messages within Application, Security and System. All fairly safe so far, but he was insistent that I should not click on any of these error messages.
Now these error messages are harmless. That is probably why he did not want me to click on them and made them out to be dangerous to click on. If I had, I would have seen the error message and recognised them as when software etc had hung in the past.
For example, one of the warnings is an application purposely preventing the system going to standby – because it needed the computer to keep running.
He then tried to talk me through the next part of the scam, which was to open the run prompt and go to www.logmein123.com. This was needed because the machine would die within a few weeks if not corrected. At that point it was time to end the call.
The next step, from what I have read, is to give them access to your machine (using the innocent third party service) and then they will clear the errors and fix the machine.
Actually, the report says that they fill your computer with software that virtually blackmails a payment out of you for a couple of hundred. Refuse to pay and you can’t use your computer!
If you do have random people phoning up offering help to sort your computer, just put the phone down. They are not really randomly phoning people to give assistance and sometimes even go as far to say that there have been lots of problems reported in your street!
And never give someone access to your computer if you have not invited them in. It is dangerous and expensive!
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- This Week You Have Been Reading
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April 18th, 2011 at 6:29 pm
I had a call just like this today. He gave no specific information just kept asking me to turn on my computer so he could show me “application errors”. He said they had been recieving error warnings about my computer It all sounded complete rubbish so I hung up.
July 15th, 2011 at 12:27 pm
I got one of these calls yesterday; had never been warned about them, so accepted it as routine. also, I had recieved a notice of updates available and figured this was in response to that. I did download the “viewer” however and could see him making changes in my files. As the call progressed I got more and more suspicious. When he said my Windows license had expired and said it would cost $99 to renew it, I knew it was bogus and asked for his name and number and I would call him back.
Fortunately I have a nephew who is a computer tech so he steered me through killing the viewer program and advised me to run a full computer scan three times. Also to do a registry clean which I still must ask him how to do.
Thank heaven for techs who ARE honest!
July 16th, 2011 at 9:26 am
Just happened to me this week, he sort of lost interest when I said we used Macs (not quite true) and called him a con artist but a friend did fall for this last year. They told her that the original computer manufacturer had contracted them to monitor all the PC’s they made through some sort of ‘hidden’ software. A quick phone call to the manufacturer would have sorted it.