Microsoft Windows Scam
Please be aware that this scam has re-appeared with a vengeance. I have had to visit 6 people who have fallen for this scam in the last couple of weeks.Someone purporting to be from Microsoft Windows or a Computer Software or Maintenance Company telephones to tell you that your computer has a virus or that the firewall is broken or other such problem. Another tack for them is now that Windows XP is not supported by Microsoft, they offer a "solution" for this. 1. Microsoft does not telephone people to tell them that their computer is not working properly.2. Microsoft is physically unable to monitor all the computers in the world that are running Windows – there are in excess of 1 billion which is greater than the number of automobiles in the world!The scam is for someone to phone a computer user and say that they are from Microsoft Windows. They explain that the user’s 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 the user’s computer is running very slowly and that it may crash at any minute. The caller may even get the user 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.This entire preface is to get the user to agree to allow the caller to “rectify” the computer. The caller will give the user a website address and ask them to open that site and then a dialogue box will appear with a request for a six digit number. The caller will give the user this number and after the user has entered it then the caller has full access to the user’s computer! Technical Support specialists from various companies use this technique and are absolutely diligent in ensuring that the work they carry out is proper and safe. These scam artists just use it to put malware onto a computer for later use.After a few minutes of seemingly frenetic work, the caller announces that the computer is fixed and that a fee of around £200, £100 or £72.50 is now payable! If you give details of your credit card, then you will find that not the fee is taken but a very quick £1 – to check that the account is valid. Then further amounts are taken without authorisation. In the last week a lady who was scammed had £1,700 taken from her credit card account in just a few hours.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, “keystroke trackers” were planted deep into the workings of the computer system. These little files track 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.
Paul Ambridge ● 4527d3 Comments