Microsoft Windows Scam Operating Again
Please be aware of the scam that is going around again where someone purporting to be from Microsoft Windows telephones to tell you that your computer has a virus or that the firewall is broken or other such problem.They explain that your computer is in some way faulty. This fault may vary from phone call to phone call but it is very believable. The caller will say that your computer is running very slowly and that it may crash at any minute. The caller may even get you to open a program called “Windows Event Viewer” which will produce a list of what seems like program errors but is of no significance to the general user.The entire preface is to get you to agree to allow the caller to “rectify” the computer. The caller will give you a website address and ask you to open that site and then a dialogue box will appear with a request for a six digit number. The caller will give you this number and after you have entered it then the caller has full access to your computer! After a few minutes of seemingly frenetic work, the caller announces that the computer is fixed and that a fee of around £200 is now payable! If you give details of your credit card, then you will find that not £200 is taken but a very quick £1 – to check that the account is valid. Then further amounts are taken without authorisation. I have been told that many, many hundreds of pounds can be taken out of an account this way.If you don’t pay and slam the phone down in disgust then the second part of the scam comes into play. While the caller was “fixing” the user’s computer, a “keystroke tracker” was planted deep into the workings of the computer system. This little file tracks all the keystrokes that the user makes while the computer is switched on. These include any password used, any bank account details or any security network phrase. This tracker is also usually accompanied by a website tracker that records any website visited. Every time that the user accesses the internet, these two trackers send information to the scammers. You can imagine the potential for a thief who can see what financial website a user visits together with all the keystrokes used at that site.The reason for this warning is because, a few weeks ago, I spent four hours working on a friend’s computer after she had been scammed this way. Let me say immediately that she is very intelligent, is relatively street-wise, and has a level of computer knowledge but still fell for it! The man on the other end of the phone was superb at his job, had all the answers necessary and was extremely polite and helpful – or so it seemed. She phoned me after the event to ask whether she had done the right thing. I told her it was a scam and to immediately contact her bank/card company. Less than an hour after the scam had taken place an initial £1 had been taken from her account in readiness for further amounts. So acting very quickly meant that she had only lost a £1 but her card has now been stopped and she has to wait for a new card to arrive. It would seem that the scammers are extremely diligent in covering all possible angles to try and get money. Once they get their hook into a possible victim then it is very difficult to get rid of them. My friend had stopped the scammers taking more money from her card and so ….. they phoned her to tell her that there was a problem with her card and please would she give them details of another card to use! She declined and put the phone down. The scammers phoned a further three times to try to persuade her to give up some details of her bank account or credit cards as obviously she “owes them money for all the work that they had done on her behalf”. The final master stoke came one morning when a gentleman with an Indian accent phoned from the Western Union Anti-Scam Department. He said that he understood that a scam had been perpetrated against her and that if she provided him with details of her credit card and bank details then they would investigate! My friend thanked him for his concern and then told him to go away and put the phone down on him.I know that a number of people have received these scam calls in recent weeks and today another friend, who is in her late 70's and confined to a wheelchair, received a call purporting to be from Microsoft. She had the sense to get a friend staying with her to phone me on a mobile phone to check if this was in fact a scam. After she got the message from me that it was indeed a scam she then asked the scammer for his telephone number so that she could phone him back. He said that the company did not allow incoming calls! She then used some vocabulary to him that I cannot repeat here and put the phone down.If a scam victim allows the scammer access to their computer then the problem is knowing what the scammer may have placed placed on that victim's computer. This is what takes a lot of time and a level of expertise. Sometimes the only solution is to get the hard disk formatted and the operating system re-installed.So please, if someone phones to tell you that they are from Microsoft Windows and that your computer is at fault; please slam the phone down; you may wish to precede this with some genuine anglo-saxon words of your choice directed at the caller. You will be saving yourself a lot of aggravation and potentially a lot of money.
Paul Ambridge ● 5133d9 Comments