They called me at 11:30 at night , woke me up, 2.18.13, saying they were Microsoft, it was urgent, someone had hacked into my computer, and that I had to turn on my computer right now and do a few keyboards steps (that they would tell me), to stop the hackers. I was sleepy & taken by surprise, and got rather far into the scam before I asked for their call back number, which they gave me.
I just got one too. Obviously a boiler room background. Claimed were with Microsoft and willingly gave the number and his name. To someone older, and especially with a new computer having trouble, it would be easy to fall prey to this. It seems to be enough of a problem someone should do something.
Received a call today from them identifying a problem with my windows program. They wanted access to my system. I asked for the phone number they called from, their name, and the company name they called from. The person who spoke like he was from Somalia said his employee # was like 1702. He avoided the company name or his boss's name. I said it was a scam and hung up. Problem is seniors like me who aren't as savvy about computer systems could loose a bunch. How can these people be stopped and identified?
a girl named kathleen called and said my computer was downloading information that might damage my computer and wanted to talk me thru fixing the problem while i was at my computer...sounded fishy from the get go..
they get your name, address, and phone... call late at night and say you have a virus on computer
that needs to be fixed by midnight... supposed to turn on computer and let them do whatever. sounded
bad from start. said they were from microsoft.... voice could have been from any foreign country.
Wish I had not argued with them for 15 minutes on whether they were legit or not. I finally hung up.
THIS IS A SCAM. Read about the your-PC-is-infected-corrupted scam here http://news.softpedia.com/news/Cold-Call-Tech ... on-150170.shtml They lie about your PC sending out malware, error messages, etc., and say your PC is about to crash to frighten you into giving them remote control of your PC to fix the nonexistent problem (don't let them!). If they ask you to open the systems tab in eventvwr.msc to see all the errors, these harmless errors are *normal* for any Windows PC (mine has several and it runs just fine). Don't let them take control of your PC because they can download *real* malware, possibly a malware suite, that can spam, steal bank logins and personal info, etc. If they've remoted into your PC, the safest fix is to re-format your drive and re-install your OS assuming you have clean backups of your data. You can try scanning with various antivirus software but scanning may not find all the malware. If you don't know how, get help from friends or pay a local shop to do it.