We are more than a little cross and upset in this household. One of the more senior members of our family has been duped out of £120 by this Internet Scam.
He was rung, out of the blue, the caller convinced him there were problems with his computer that could be fixed remotely. They led him to believe they were ringing on behalf of Microsoft, they weren’t. There were no problems to fix, they conned him out of £120 and goodness know what information they have accessed by gaining remote access to his PC. We’ve got him to unplug the PC and we are making arrangement to rebuild his PC for him.
I’ve mentioned before, we don’t like being conned, please spread the word on this, we know of others who have been approached. Grrrrrrrr!
Technorati Tags: Internet Support Scams,Computer support scams
Uphilldowndale 
March 5, 2011 at 11:15 am
I am sorry to hear about the scam, it is an unpleasant thought that through fear we are duped into spending money. I managed to contract a spyware winhdd recently and luckily managed to fix it though not before I almost spent 70 pounds on the fix through the scambot just goes to prove even with experience you can sometimes fall victim.
March 5, 2011 at 11:28 am
I got a cold call saying pc would stop in an hour, and fell for it, It was a USA address but very Indian voice, realised later he did not ask to access p.c, realised when curser moved. He took a long time to get to the cost of £99.00 a year, meantime he had accessed pc without permission. When statement came saw payment was to another company, contacted them and got a speedy repayment, havent heard anything since, i am very lucky!
March 5, 2011 at 12:14 pm
I once came very close to a major social gaffe, thinking I was talking to an Indian call centre, when I wasn’t!
I hope this can be resolved as smoothly 😦
March 5, 2011 at 11:50 am
This has being going on for ages and I get a couple of calls a week. They ask for me so I say hold on put the phone down and leave them hanging on until the phone starts wailing at me.
Sadly it seems that little can be done to stop these scammers. xx
March 5, 2011 at 12:15 pm
We also get several cold calls a week from India or the Far East. They never have the chance to get as far as telling us why they’ve rung. We’ve signed up for the Telephone Preference Service which should mean we don’t get unsolicited calls, but overseas companies don’t take any notice.
March 5, 2011 at 5:11 pm
Like you I’m with the TPS but unfortunately it doesn’t cover calls from abroad, which are the only unsolicited ones I now get.
March 5, 2011 at 12:09 pm
I don’t know how these people sleep at night!
The other one on the go at the moment is calling to tell people they have an unpaid telephone bill, and they’ll be cut off they don’t immediately pay some random amount of money. Linky;
http://bt.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/c/347,476,477/a_id/13395
We had an attempt made at this a couple of months ago – and we don’t even have a BT line anymore. I took the same approach as Flighty, and left the chappy hanging on the phone while I went off and did the hoovering. He’d gone by the time I’d finished, but it’s well worth warning people about.
March 5, 2011 at 5:38 pm
It’s very depressing that people who obviously have energy and talent should waste it in swindles. They must have the nerve and the ability to prosper without making other people’s lives a misery.
March 5, 2011 at 5:52 pm
I hope you did as the article suggested and reversed the charge. Those jackals prey on the elderly, the ignorant, and the gullible (sorry Mr. Uhdd). And as P. T. Barnum said, “There’s one born every minute.” There were times my mom would call me in a panic over some phishing scam email purporting to be from one of her utility companies or her bank. I’ve finally succeeded in getting it across to her that those people do not contact you by email. They send written correspondence. (You’d think a long-time legal secretary would realize that something on paper amounts to a legal document and would understand the concept of “paper trail.”) Since I use the internet a lot to research things for my job, I not infrequently run into these websites that pretend to be a “virus scan” service of internet explorer warning me that my PC is infected — and is halfway into a “scan” of my computer that shows it’s infected with all sorts of bad stuff before I can “Task manager” out of it — which is the only way you can get rid of it! Then I have to run a real virus/malware/trojan scan to clean up after them!
We have a thing here called “Caller ID” and all my phones have a caller ID display — I simply do not accept calls from callers who do not identify themselves on caller ID. Period.
March 6, 2011 at 9:16 am
That is just plain rotten! It’s hard to believe how some people feed off others in order to ‘do business’. I hope somehow you are able to stop payment of the funds from reaching these creeps ~ and I do hope your financial/privacy info hasn’t been compromised. It is a warning to us all, especially honest folks who are used to taking people at their word. Arrggh!
March 9, 2011 at 6:08 pm
One of these morons rang my mum up last year, and tried it on. She told him to ring back when I was in, which surprisingly enough he did. Now, my mum’s PC is a Linux unit so all the normal “Windows virus” malarkey is definitely untrue; the bloke also muffed it when he insisted that the geographical address was what he wanted to check, not the IP address. Had he asked for an IP, I’d have told him something in the 172.16.0.0/12 address space, which is private but not many people know about it.
However, he didn’t but instead gave me an opportunity to play “Let’s all wind up the scammer” instead. So, pretend to log onto a PC, and tell him the screen is dark, am I supposed to turn it on? Oh, you didn’t say that; but its still dark, shall I plug it in too?
And then on with gibbering about interwebby things, and basically creatively misunderstanding as much as I possibly could without falling over from giggling so much. Pretending that the machine was a Sun system rather went over his head, but “borrowing my sister’s laptop” which turned out to be an Apple really got him going. In the end he slammed the phone down in sheer disgust at having provided a half hour or so of sheer entertainment to a very, very cruel man…
March 9, 2011 at 10:49 pm
I love your approach! If only I’d had the opportunity to try that.