Microsoft Tech Support Scam

[Crilly]

Just received a call from a guy claiming to be from Microsoft Tech Support offering to help me out with a couple of viruses i have on my computer. New straight away that this was some kind of scam and put the phone down, this guy called me back within a few second, i asked how be got my number and he stated that hardware within the computer submits the details to Microsoft when i first bought the computer from the shop, advised that i built the computer myself so he was taking bollocks, i have never registered my windows 7 .

The only thing that worries me is that i have just reinstalled Windows 7 because of a virus that i just could not get rid of, was this a lucky guess by the scammers or could the virus have something to with them.

These people piss be off because if this had been my mum she would have believed every word.

Anyone else had any experience of this.

[Over Carl]

People I know have been called, some of them are quite tricky, they point people towards the event logs - on pretty much any windows box you will see errors in there which suddenly makes them sound a lot more genuine to those not in the know.

Soemone tried calling my mum recently when I was working as an IT tech and stood right next to her, she told the guy on the phone she would put him on to her techie, guy hung up before I got the phone!

[bomberman]

I had a call a few months ago and said that their information must be wrong as I've a Mac (not really). He apologised and hung up.

[funkyg]

One of our board members fell for this with his personal computer.
Paid out about £150 in total for them to 'fix' the errors and viruses that he had.

[DejaVu]

What I would give for one of these phone calls!!

[Little John]

I got one, quite enjoyable really as the psu had just gone so I wanted him to fix it for me so I carried on with the call and he got really annoyed when I started calling them scamming and lots of expletives thrown in and he kept saying "what is this language you are using" and we carried on for about 10 minutes till I called him a wanker and hung up. He phoned me back a few times as I just kept hanging up on him.

Another one was a friend's mum who handed over card details etc and they accessed the laptop then phoned me a day later to ask if it was genuine. cancelled the card contacted the bank and they refunded the money taken for the service. I had a look at the laptop and it actually did look like they had done some work removing spy ware, installed mbam and installed AVG (removing the Norton that was on there). nothing malicious was found on there or anything to worry about but got the refund and the laptop was fine.

I guess some of them are bad this time she was lucky but they are just preying on unknowledgeable people

[WRATH OF BOD]

I got one, quite enjoyable really as the psu had just gone so I wanted him to fix it for me so I carried on with the call and he got really annoyed when I started calling them scamming and lots of expletives thrown in and he kept saying "what is this language you are using" and we carried on for about 10 minutes till I called him a wanker and hung up. He phoned me back a few times as I just kept hanging up on him.

Another one was a friend's mum who handed over card details etc and they accessed the laptop then phoned me a day later to ask if it was genuine. cancelled the card contacted the bank and they refunded the money taken for the service. I had a look at the laptop and it actually did look like they had done some work removing spy ware, installed mbam and installed AVG (removing the Norton that was on there). nothing malicious was found on there or anything to worry about but got the refund and the laptop was fine.

I guess some of them are bad this time she was lucky but they are just preying on unknowledgeable people

i see this alot, had 3 customers in this week who all had fell for it, infact i must of delt with about 15 in the last six months or so.
all where old getting on abit & not savy with a pc.

[bigtrevster]

I have had it twice now,each time i told them i was running Linux (i'm not) first time i milked the shit outta them the wife even picked up the house phone to have a listen and near pissed with laughter, 2nd time i pissed them off with the linux statment and got passed to the boss man,i took the piss with him a bit but then he swung it around and annoyed me saying "so you wanna buy,buy, wanna buy,do you wanna buy..................... on and on so i cracked and called him a wee wanker and wished i could get my hand's on him....how many people have fallen for it tho?

[ka$h]

The Mrs got a call a couple of weeks back elling her that her windows PC was infected. Letting him ramble on, he said to go to 'My Computer' to which she replid that she hasn't got that icon. He was adamant she had and he tried explaining to click the start button with the windows symbol in the corner. She asked if he meant the apple in the top left corner to which he hung up! :|

Wish it was me who answered as I would have followed every instruction he had to tell him that it had failed.

Oh, the other strange thing is the number came up as 0123 456 789 on the caller id!

[plug1]

the caller id is from a voip call. its default on some systems.
plug.