Scam IT calls

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Joined
3 Jan 2005
Posts
963
Location
Bridgend
Mod can you move if this should not be in general

Had a call from my Gran the other day, while my Granfather was on the phone. Had a call from a company claiming to be Microsoft IT support. Telling him his PC was full of viruses.

Number: 02088199804
Symantec having a go at them - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhV6rIgyQ-s

They got him to use logmein so they could remote his PC and started to load Event viewer, and the temp folder telling him all the errors where viruses. They also loaded the certificates screen and said they where call going to expire.

I told my granfather just to hang up on them and shutdown the PC until I got there.

Loaded it up to find this

SBBHw.jpg

They had created a vbscript and put it in startup to give the messages everytime it loads...............................am **fully start out swearies in future** fuming

My Granfather has the full version of AVG and they said its was rubbish. They wanted him to pay them £89 to clean up his PC
 
AVG is rubbish, I use to use it but like Mcaffee it slows down my pc far to much. There is plenty of free alternatives like Microsoft Security Essentials that work just fine. I've had calls like this before, as soon as they say my pc is infected I hang up lol
 
Number: 02088199804
Symantec having a go at them - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhV6rIgyQ-s

One of the amusing things about this video is that the end section illustrates how frustrating it can be to deal with Indians working in IT. (I don't mean colleagues in the UK who happen to be Indian or of Indian origin but 3rd party IT outsourcing companies in India)

I had to deal with a number of Indian firms in a previous role and the common trend is that when they don't know something, or have contradicted themselves or done something wrong they will never admit to it straight away.
 
How many threads do we have to have about this!

Probably not enough. There's definitely something going on this year. I've had two of these calls in the last 3 months, and it seems you can't go anywhere without hearing it mentioned.

There really ought to be somebody who could (legally) get these people shut down. I know you can't stamp it out completely, given the international nature of the calls, but nobody seems to be making life difficult for them.

My tactic is to try and make the person calling feel guilty about what they're doing. Waste of time and effort, but it keeps me amused for the few seconds it takes them to put the phone down.
 
the shame of it all is that people on this forum wouldn't get caught out by this scam, but lots of other people, especially older people will
 
I've had one of these calls it was great, played along for a while and even managed to use the phrase "oh noes i haz viruses" when they got me to check my event log. Then had a nice discussion with a 'microsoft specialist' when i called them out on the fact that m$ never contact their customers unless they contact them first.
 
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