by Geeks Team | Aug 27, 2015 | Online Safety
We have received a few too many calls recently from unfortunate customers who have fallen victim to scammers who claim to be working for Microsoft, one of the major banks, or local utility companies. To make this clear before we go on, Microsoft, Apple, your bank or utility company will never call you asking for personal details or payment card information without solicitation. In the case of the Microsoft scammers, Microsoft employees will never call you out of the blue and offer to fix your computer. If this happens, simply hang up the phone. So What Happens? These people work by calling their potential victim, acting as if they are calling from Microsoft, and telling them they have found problems on the victims PC that need to be fixed (Microsoft do not collect the personally identifiable information needed to link a computer to its owner). The scammer will say they can remotely connect to the computer to ‘fix’ any issues for a fee. They will back up their claims by showing you the computers’ event log and pointing out any errors on it. It’s worth noting here that nearly every home-use out-of-the-box PC will show errors in the event log which in most cases are absolutely nothing to worry about. Once they have convinced their victim, these people will send them to a website such as www.ammyy.com and take remote control of the PC with the promise to remove any viruses, and fix any problems. It’s probably apparent by now that this is not the case. At best, they will make it look as though they are doing something...
Recent Comments