A friend emailed me about a scam her dad fell for in the UK, I broadcast it to friends and anothers dad had also had the same scam call so in the hope of stopping someone elses parents getting caught:

The scam is someone phones up claiming to be from microsoft and claims there's a problem on your machine that they have detected, they take you through some nonsense commands on the machine that indicate you have a 'heavy infection' then get you to go through www.ammyy.com which is legitimate remote control software and not associated with the scam. Then the caller spends some time remote controlling the machine until he 'fixes' the problem and charges you 70-186 pounds.

My friends dad paid up, my friends mum contacted the credit card and had the payment stopped, at which point they got phone calls threatening legal action.

The other friends dad had a mac and they hung up when he told them. The company was called 'Solutions 1000' the internets also have the same scam from a company called 'Nerdsupport'

here's some more info on it

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/...php?p=36100991
http://www.reviewcentre.com/reviews247659.html

Reported in Australia as well, as early as April 2009:

http://www.smh.com.au/technology/sec...0630-zm8i.html

http://www.police.qld.gov.au/News+an...uter+users.htm

Quite a nice twist to it here. This one was also posted today.

My son just had a phone call from an Indian sounding chap explaining that my computer has a virus, and how damaging it is and blah blah, and that some software giving control of my pc to him needed to be installed etc.

Obvious scam - reported in the UK - and now here.

I doubt it will catch on much. The guy only spoke English.

hah It is also happening here.
In China, people may get a call from the "bank" saying that their credit cards or debit cards have been used by others and asking them to follow the "bank"s instructions to transfer all the money in the account into the "safety police bank account". A lot of people got scammed

We had a couple of those about a fortnight ago. I just told them I didn't have a computer
"You have a lap-top then" was the reply.
I said, "no" and the guy/lady hung up without saying goodbye.

I had Microsoft calling me last night claiming my PC had a problem.
Sir if your computer didn't crash in the last 12 hours; somthing must be wrong with your windows setup.

Honestly, how can you fall for that??

Tonight I got a call from an Indo/Pak woman from this UK phone number 0044 1865 600154, the 1st time I pressed the wrong button and cut them off, but they called back and she said she was from MicroSoft and my computer had downloaded some hacking software and this had flashed up an alert at Microsoft security dept'. She was asking me to go to my computer, but her English was really very poor, and the line was very very bad and I hung up. I was suspicious and called the number back and just got the normal domestic type BT voice mail.

My friend Google tells me that this is latest scammers phone technique, telling people they the have a computer virus or there machine has been hacked, and they will fix it by shared access.... and bingo they control your machine.

Beware all!

They are not very bright if they didn't hide their number. That is an Oxford number.

Tell them you are running Linux ( Fedora Core etc. ).

Tell them to hold on while you fetch your lap top, lay the phone down & wait to see how long they keep the call open........

Just got a call from these helpful folks. After the spiel about my computer problems the nice lady asked, "were you aware of this?". I said,"Are you with Mac?". Click. Didn't want her to hang up- I was hoping to wind them up a bit, I guess they know how to spot a pigeon .

Had a call this morning. When my girlfriend said to them she didn't know them and wouldn't allow anyone to go into her computer they put the phone down!

i was a little bored this morning - so i enjoyed stringing my little 'helper' along a little, for 30 minutes or so. When looking for 'error' or 'warning' events he was baffled why i had none....of course i did, but i wanted to see his next move...aha, i had a really bad infection, so they were being hidden....so now i know....Anyway, when i asked how the weather is in Kolkata he claimed he was in an office in victoria, england..oh in london...so i played a little eye-spy with him, you know, any well known public buildings nearby, what bus routes pass by, that sort of thing...i've not been to victoria for a while, but it seems my google earth was more helpful than his local knowledge...btw- he wanted me to use www.teamviewer.com to give him access to the pc....it took him 32 minutes before he said (very politely) 'i think you are wasting my time sir'...

Posts like that make me want to get a landline phone!

Well, they probably thought you were some kind of freak!!
Excuse me ... you are wasting his time??!!

How do these people get our phone numbers? Or do they just dial randomly?

I use teamviewer .. free but powerful remote control I use for my home pc
peek at my cam, control downloads . Unlike Logmein, the more popular remote control software, teamviewer has less fuzz with security and client even works from my cheap zte SF android phone. Too bad its now used for scams. Thanks for the heads up, have to keep my security airtight now.

My Computer colleage tells a great story about this one. As IT professionals we like to think we should be better prepared than the layan.

Patrick got such a call so generated a VMwave virtual machine runnning a current version of windows but with no applications or other than Anti Virus and Anti Malware running.

Sure enough on remote connect this "support guy" fumbled around for about 30 minutes and said that he'd found some problems and fixed them. When asked to identify what he'd really done though he could not substantiate his claims to fixing everything and when Patrick refused to pay the Asian man turned ugly and started swearing rude words at my friend.

Patrick said it made a delightful end to the evening and that we both commented that if these Asians spent more time in dubious activities it might leave them less time to oursource our legitimate IT jobs.

regards marcus b.

And again...happened to be at home today as my little one was ill, and had the call from the charming Indian-sounding chap. What a nasty scam - I expect they are browsing the Swiss phone information for anglicised names and giving them a call on the off-chance.

In case it's helpful to others to know their tactics, as I was very suspicious he offered to check with me whether he had my unique id code only known by me and MS. Just to see what he would do, he guided me to type cmd into the run box and then wanted me to type "assoc". I am no expert, but expecting that this was probably the start of a process to "associate" with another persons' machine, I decided it was the right moment to end the call - but I presume if I'd carried on he would have carefully guided me through a process which would have enabled him to (unknown to me) see the same ID number on my screen and then he'd be easily able to "prove" that he had the same number as me, QED. Watch out everyone....