Scammer Alert

I was sitting at the computer this morning when the phone rang. It was the Windows Microsoft Technical Department? He told me that my computer had been acting up and he was calling to fix it for me. He said he had the computer's personal identification number, specific to each and every computer. Nobody but registered technicians and me had the number. He had me open a DOS cmd window and type "assoc", which brought up what looked like file associations. He pointed me to the longest line and had me follow it as he read it off, matching it digit for digit. My Bullshit Meter was pegged by this time, but it was a pretty convincing scam. I asked him why both he, the supervisor, and his young techie were both sporting eastern Indian accents and calling from Texas instead of Silicon Valley or Redmond.

I said "No, I'm not comfortable continuing this dialog." so he proceeds to tell me that they cannot be held responsible for anything that happens, that the hacker is hacking away at my computer as we speak. By this time, I had "zfsendtotarget" googled up and it was warning about others of his type doing this scam, and that the clsid of that target is the same on every computer, that these guys want to sell you a very expensive malware suite and/or put a healthy virus on your computer.

If I hadn't just had a recent run-in with a virus attempt, I would have quickly told him to bugger off. But he had me (cautiously) going there for a few minutes.

Be warned, these assholes are out there and seem to be multiplying. It's too bad one can't send a 750KV spike direct to their computer or phone during one of these attempts, isn't it?

Reply to
Larry Jaques
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Had that as well , but was awake to them , as soon as I hear Gupta or Sanjays accent I hang up . I've also learnt not to answer the phone during the day if I'm home or before 7.00pm any night , that's when all the spam calls happen.

Reply to
Bluey69

Those Indians are also running the IRS scam.

Speaking with thick indian accent: "This is John Smith from the IRS, this is a very sensitive issue, you are going to be arrested for tax evasion, buy us a Moneypak card at Walgreens".

i

f> I was sitting at the computer this morning when the phone rang. It

Reply to
Ignoramus21640

We've recieved several of these "Microsoft Techincal Support" calls over the last couple years. I generally just hang up on them; but in one instance, I told the caller that I needed them to identify which one of the systems that were on my LAN (varies from 3-10 on a given day) was the one they had identified as the problem? The woman caller answered: "Huh?", then hung up. Guess she didn't want to help me find that inffested computer after all? ;-)

We got the first "IRS" scam call on our answering machine a few days ago. Interestingly, this call used a "synthesized" voice - not a real person, or recroding of a real person's voice. The call warned that the (unidentified) matter was "extremely urgent", and stated they would initiate legal action against me if I did not immediately return their call by calling their "hot line" number. Their message concluded, hilariously, with "have a wonderful day".

Good for some laughs; but I worry about elderly people falling for these kinds of scams.

BTW, I recall reading somewhere, a warning that these IRS scammers can fake/trick the caller ID to make it appear that the incoming call was from the IRS.

Reply to
Bill

A n unsophisticated friend got that call and it led to the scammer connecting to his computer via a remote assistance connection. Once the guy was logged in to his computer he could have done anything he wanted, with the administrator permissions that my friend had as the computer owner.

When the scammer asked him for credit card information to pay for the "fix" that the scammer said he'd do, he (thankfully) told the guy he wasn't comfortable doing that and said he wanted to check with someone else (me) before he gave they guy the CC information. The scammer said he'd call back in a half hour. My friend called me and I told him what was going on and stopped the scam cold.

Now, of course, there was no way to know what the guy had done while he was logged in remotely, so I took my friend's computer over to my place, kept it off the internet, reformatted the hard drive, and reinstalled the OS back to the way it was when it was purchased. His personal files were safe because when I had first set up the machine for him I also set up a scheduled task to do a daily midnight copy of all his personal files to a thumb drive that I kept plugged into the back of the machine. So after I confirmed that no file in the backup had a last-update date on it later than the previous night's backup it was easy to get it back to where it was before the scam started. The whole process took about a half-day of my time.

This doesn't mean some other scammer won't try to take a shot at him, but I think I put the fear of god into him.

Tom

Reply to
tdacon

Yeah, we got some of these calls a few months ago. They were actually trying to tell me that Microsoft was responsible for our computers that all run Linux! We have nothing running Windows here except for some ancient apps run on a VMware virtual machine.

Very funny. Yup, the same indian accents, too.

Jon

Reply to
Jon Elson

I asked if he could mail the info to me and let me look at it, to which he said "As soon as we fix the problem for you, we will mail you the info. Let us proceed."

Reply to
Larry Jaques

I've gotten similar calls -- but they end when they discover that I'm not running Windows. :-)

They start out by claiming that my Windows computer is spewing out spam. :-) (Since the only machine with Windows on it is turned on perhaps once or twice a year, and certainly was not on then ... :-)

Oh yes -- it is also behind the firewall in a way to prevent it from even reaching the outside net -- let alone letting the net reach in to it. :-)

[ ... ]

Indeed so. Them and others of the ilk -- computer related or other scams.

Thanks, DoN.

Reply to
DoN. Nichols

Reply to
Geoff

In India, if a person of any background could buy any type of weapon they wanted, then would India be as "free" as the US ??

Reply to
walter_evening

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