News - Microsoft exposes telephone PC security scam

[HEXUS]

Criminals are posing as security experts and ripping off punters.

Read more.

[Gordy]

Tons of my clients get these, I go through phases of getting a couple a week too. Apparently telling them to **** off doesn't get through...

Thank god for caller id, I can pretty much tell when they are calling.

There are a few variations including pretending to be from Sky/Virgin Media and Google.

So far none of my clients have fallen for it, but I'm sure it must get a decent haul of people, because everyone seems to assume that Microsoft know and care who they are for some reason.

[bradyjames]

My dad had one of these calls last week. Luckily he didn't fall for it. Interesting that he has never had a call either until he bought a laptop.

I've had PC's for over 15 years and I've never had a call. But I always build my own so maybe these scammers don't know I exist.

My dad bought from a well known PC retailer - I wonder if they are sharing out his details with third parties etc.

[iworrall]

I tell them that their downloaded exe won't run.
I then string them along for a while until I let slip I'm running Linux!

[skwaa91]

I've actually had quite a few calls off these people from "Windows" R.
Every time I just tell them I'm running Linux.
One thing, they just seem to be getting any number they can purchase (or even guess?) on the offchance they will get a household with atleast one Windows PC in, Which shouldn't be too hard considering how many are sold.
All my systems since I believe the early 2000s have been built by myself.
My dad thought the call was serious, luckily he decided to ask me to fix it rather than allow them to!

[watercooled]

Oh I'd love to receive one of these calls, would be great fun!

[crossy]

Oh I'd love to receive one of these calls, would be great fun!

Yep, I got one of these in February - pretending to be from the company IT desk, (shame I didn't fall for it because IT dept have certain key phrases and info they use to prove their identity).

I was waiting for a build to complete, so I had the time to have some real fun with "Roger" (first clue - Anglo name on someone who's first language obviously wasn't English, and was reading from a script). I strung that bozo along for nearly 10 minutes before coming clean that I was actually on an Ubuntu system.

He got irate, at which point I was able to unload a sizeable amount of my invective library - definitely good for relieving stress!

Laugh was on me though when I discovered I had to report that call to Security ...

It also occurs to me that switching into pointy-haired-boss mode would be a hoot too - see how stupid you could pretend to be before they'd cotton on that it was a p-take?

[watercooled]

Prepares Duke Nukem quotes...

[Hicks12]

|Balls of steel

, love it when they try and phone me, well actually its more 99% cold callers and sales people rather than scams but eitherway i always make them rage, i say no not interested but if they push it i just continue annoying them... best is when they say about BB, had talktalk ring me up trying to get me to switch from virgin!.

[watercooled]

I had an amusing email conversation with the president of some country or other who was about to entrust me with a few million.
It was a secondary email I'd only set up for that reason (expected to be spammed) and had nothing of value on it so I didn't care if it got spammed to death.

They had spoofed the from address to appear to be from the country's gov't but the headers told a different story altogether...

[cameronlite]

Just another reason I hate this country. Not the fact that these people are making the calls, but that people are stupid enough to take them seriously.

You don't have to be computer literate to realise that the person phoning you, telling you your computer is broken, is scamming you.

[watercooled]

There's only so much security firms and app developers can do to guard against malware/hacking. The user needs to have some form of common sense too. It's like those people who come out and try to point out a missing tile on your roof but they can fix it for £x. You'd think no-one would fall for it but enough do.

[Hicks12]

yup, common sense > any third party protection.. click random links is just asking for it, a family friend loves played old games and hes really bad with computers (to put it mildly) and pretty much installs anything that looks "cool" and using third party email clients cause the ad said so along with the old your computer is infected download this software to kill the 10000000 detected threats. Wont believe how many times ive had to sort it out for him, if only he would listen to any advice we give him then we wouldnt need to rofl.

[Xaduurv]

Add Australia to your list of affected regions. I got called by them two days ago. Gosh they're horrible...

and obvious! I said to them that if you can detect this on my system you can tell me what version of Windows I'm running. They couldn't.

[joel_spencer]

Almost everyone knows someone who has been affected by this so hardly exposing it. Additionally some of them claim to be from Microsoft and the programs use Microsoft branding so if I were them I would be more worried about doing something productive as people will believe it is Microsoft doing it.

Virgin are probably only doing it because similar software uses their branding and the supplied branded Mcafee (all majorISPs seem to offer a branded version now) is not effective at preventing them.

As stated before, user error/ignorance is the ultimate problem. Antivirus software is at best a condom, once it's in reinstall/treat.

[Betty_Swallocks]

Just another reason I hate this country. Not the fact that these people are making the calls, but that people are stupid enough to take them seriously.
.

You're kidding? Right? You think it'd be any different in any other country? There people who don't know much about computers in every country in the world.