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Solve : Telephone caller wants to protect me from hackers? |
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Answer» So i get a phone call out of the blue last night. The CALLER asks for someone of another name, and when my wife says that person isn't here, he starts talking to her. He has an Indian accent and there are background noises like a customer service center. She doesn't understand what he wants, so she gives the phone to me. He proceeds to tell me that his "company" has detected a hacker trying to compromise my system. I've never heard of any compaany ever contacting people by phone to warn them of something like this, so I continue to listen for a while, mainly because of all the trouble I've had trying to install Win7. So i question him on some things, then i give him a little flack, and accused him of being some kind of scammer. Then i said goodbye and hung up. Has anyone else gotten a phone call like that?N o, I get calls that are much more disturbing. Much more disturbing. "We have detected that you need more Vi-a-gra" How did they find out? Quote from: sblev on May 14, 2014, 11:59:20 PM So i get a phone call out of the blue last night. The caller asks for someone of another name, and when my wife says that person isn't here, he starts talking to her. He has an Indian accent and there are background noises like a customer service center. She doesn't understand what he wants, so she gives the phone to me. He proceeds to tell me that his "company" has detected a hacker trying to compromise my system. I've never heard of any compaany ever contacting people by phone to warn them of something like this, so I continue to listen for a while, mainly because of all the trouble I've had trying to install Win7. So i question him on some things, then i give him a little flack, and accused him of being some kind of scammer. Then i said goodbye and hung up. These are very very common in Great Britain and other English speaking first world countries. They operate out of countries like India, Phillipines, etc. The large call center has a computerised calling system with your country's phone books loaded. The system dials numbers at random, and when a called number picks up, the connection is routed to the next waiting operator, who sees the number, name and ADDRESS of the listed subscriber on his screen. He then asks to speak to the subscriber and whatever the REPLY, begins his speech about detecting some kind of scary security problem with "your computer". They operate on a number of assumptions: most people in Western countries have a computer running Windows; most of these are not computer savvy; many of them will have had some kind of issue or problem recently. They don't actually KNOW if you have a PC or if you do, anything about it. (How could they?) They sometimes say they are from the "Microsoft security department" or else from "your ISP". If you challenge them to name the ISP they will guess. If they still have your attention by this point they may try to win your belief that they know something by making you open a command prompt and type something that will produce a long list of stuff, and tell you to look for something on the last line of the list, something that they know is always there on a Windows machine. They will say this "proves" you have a problem. The aim is to get your credit card details to pay for a fake "service" that cures nothing and may even introduce spyware. You may find regular payments for a "subscription" coming from your account. A side effect of reaching this stage is that you are now identified as a gullible person, a "mark", and you can expect all sorts of further calls. I lived in the UK for some time and calls like this were an issue. To be honest, getting scammed or conned in general was an issue. There were always warning about things like this in the news. Good you went with your gut and aren't gullible like lots of people are. My rule of thumb is, if I didn't pay for it, then it's probably not good for me (at least when it comes to tech stuff). Quote You lose both your money and privacy.Worth repeating. Quote from: Geek-9pm on August 03, 2014, 11:55:13 AM Worth repeating. He is spamming this forum for his "blog". Geek why did you resurrect this thread ? ?Sorry, somehow I CAME up as an unread item. Quote from: patio on August 03, 2014, 09:27:09 PM Geek why did you resurrect this thread ? ?A spam post resurrected it; it has now been removed |
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