My uncle called me yesterday, he’d had a called from someone claiming they were from Microsoft and were letting him know he had errors on his computer, my heart sank, this is the uncle I’d ask to stop forwarding spoof emails from people claiming that if you open an email with the subject ‘Olympic Torch’ it would delete everything on my hard drive. It had taken me years to persuade that you shouldn’t delete the system file that an email said he should and then persuade everyone in your address book to do the same.
The caller had given him instructions to access the E
vent Viewer section of his computer to be able to point out to him the errors his computer had been recording and forwarding to Microsoft, the idea then being to take card details to pay to clean up these errors remotely, they get you to allow access to your computer and then take control from afar.
Luckily for my uncle as he is partially sighted, the screen reading software he has didn’t recognise the Event Viewer window and he couldn’t see the errors they were telling him about and then of course he then called me. I’ve spent an hour or so calling my less techy relatives to warn them about this scam, I couldn’t just email them as I’ve complained loudly at them doing that, if you know anyone who has a computer and might be taken in by this, please, please just warn them.
I agree, NEVER let any one who has called you out of the blue access to your PC!
Tell them that you are recording the conversation and see how long it is before they hang up!
Loads of scams like this going on right now. Always ask a professional first before letting anyone loose on your machine. If someone calls you out the blue, hang up!!
Nice post D!