Microsoft Scammers "fixing computers" once again
These people are called "Ransom Hijackers" according to my favorite IT guy, whom I totally trust. The didn't call me, but did get a pop-up on my laptop and it almost all went downhill to HELL after that. I didn't get ripped off, but learned a valuable lesson. Bob Crane goes on to explain the various ways that they can do this to YOU. BE careful!!!!! It's rampant!!!
(This reminds me of what so-called investors/loan people did to the elderly during the downturn in the economy to steal their homes out from underneath them).
Microsoft Scammers "fixing computers" once again
Well after getting three calls from these helpful hackers this week I think that it may be a good time to revive an old post that I wrote a few years ago.
I hope none of you fell for this crew of helpful hackers when they called to offer you a little bit of assistance.
If you did then this would be a good time to cancel all of your credit cards and change all of your paswords.
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Microsoft is hiring people to help fix my computer, or is it my bank account?
I got a few calls lately from a fellow who was barely understandable due to an extreme accent, saying something about being hired by Microsoft to fix my computer.
Apparently he had some type of knowledge that my computer had been infected by a virus that all of the virus checking software could not detect, but Microsoft knew that I had it.
If you are going to run a scam, rule #1, dont say that you are working for Microsoft, anyone who has windows knows that although they make great software, they never answer the phone, and certainly wouldnt be out calling the public to warn them or help them with a computer problem.
The first time he called about a month ago I was rather busy so I asked him if he thought that I was crazy or just an idiot, which prompted another round of jabbering something that I could not understand before I hung up.
Well this past week, he called again, this time I was ready for a distraction and a bit of fun.
So I listened very carefully and asked him to repeat a lot of things until I could figure out what he was talking about, knowing that the more time he spent on the phone with me would be saving some nieve fool from getting ripped today.
Eventually he walked me through how to look at the event log in the windows registry, I dont reccommend that you let a con-man take you into the system of your computer unless you are very good a knowing what can be harmed and how.
While in the event log, we found many instances of warnings and errors (they are always there), of course he used these as evidence of my computer being infected, as he had said from the beginning.
Next he wanted me to go to the run menu and punch in a web address where my problems could be fixed.
Well now that he finally gave me some true identity info on himself (his web address), now it was time to play dumb while he thought I was doing the foolish things that he was telling me, I was googling his web address.
As I suspected, it was a phishing scam, asking me to allow them access to my computer's system so that their techicians could clean out my virus problems. More likely so that their technicians could clean out my bank account and then go for a bit of identity theft.
I could only imagine the look on his face when I told him that the FBI had a warning out on their company and would be making arrests soon and that he should start running Now.
Unfazed, he went on to send me to several websites that he thought would convince me that they were legitimate, unfortunately for him, everytime that he gave me a website, instead of typing it into the address bar, I typed it into google where instead of the glowing praise that was probably on the sites they had set up, I found more warnings about their company.
Eventually, after reading a half dozen of these warnings to him, he finally hung up the phone, hopefully to start fleeing from the FBI, but probably on to the next mark on his call list, hopefully the next one will waste some more of his time, and not be an easy victim.
With the amount of time and effort that they spent on me, and no doubt thousands of others, I wonder how much they need to steal from the few marks that they actually fool into doing their bidding in order to make a living at this.
picture credit
- https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ by Don Hankins http://www.flickr.com/photos/23905174@N00/2524306151
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Bob Crane
Woodland Management Service
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Stevens Point, WI 54481
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