Underseer
Contributor
You may want to share this with your less tech-savvy relatives.
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Video: tech support scams explained
- Thread starter Underseer
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You may want to share this with your less tech-savvy relatives.
Underseer
Contributor
The way I explained it to my elderly parents: Microsoft and other tech companies will not call you out of the blue. They wait for you to call them, then do everything in their power to get you to give up before you get an actual human being on the phone, because if you talk to an actual human being, that costs them money.
There are extremely rare cases where your ISP (e.g. the cable company) will contact you if they have a botnet outbreak among customers that is generating too much traffic on their network, but for the most part, no one is going to call you out of the blue about a problem on your computer.
There are extremely rare cases where your ISP (e.g. the cable company) will contact you if they have a botnet outbreak among customers that is generating too much traffic on their network, but for the most part, no one is going to call you out of the blue about a problem on your computer.
Elixir
Made in America
"ACCOUNT EXPIRING!"
"LOGIN NEEDED!"
"YOUR ACCOUNT IS AT RISK!"
... there must be ten or so iterations of this that hit our network every week. I keep sending notices to everyone on the domain to delete, then empty recycling bins...
I am amazed how lame most of them are. Today's winner came from a fucking Hotmail account... sheesh.
"LOGIN NEEDED!"
"YOUR ACCOUNT IS AT RISK!"
... there must be ten or so iterations of this that hit our network every week. I keep sending notices to everyone on the domain to delete, then empty recycling bins...
I am amazed how lame most of them are. Today's winner came from a fucking Hotmail account... sheesh.
phands
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We had a spate of those calls in Ireland in the 2000s, purporting to be from Microsoft, and claiming that remotely, they had detected that my windows computer had a virus, and they would fix it if they just had my credit card number. They said it was because they had scanned my IP address, but when I asked them what my IP address was, they came up with 192.168.0.<something>, which is just absurd, as that address range is private-only, and cannot ever be seen on the internet. Also, I was using a VPN and DHCP, but also, I haven't used windoze since 2001, being a Linux user. They just tried a snow-job to get a credit card number. I kept them on the line for 10 minutes, just to have fun at their expense, then hung up.
Underseer
Contributor
My parents are elderly and have a landline, so they get several "I'm from Microsoft and we detected a virus" calls per week.
lpetrich
Contributor
I've never gotten such phone calls, but I've gotten a lot of online ads to that effect. Including ads that include fake graphics of scanning one's computer. Always assuming Windows, and I run OSX.
Cheerful Charlie
Contributor
My brother got a big spate of such scam calls about his Windows computer's malware and viruses. He runs Linux. he always started slow with them, and shifted the conversation to India's notorious lack of toilets. Fireworks generally ensue. Eventually they stopped calling.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-17377895
Is anybody really surprised that nearly half of India's 1.2 billion people have no toilet at home?
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-17377895
Is anybody really surprised that nearly half of India's 1.2 billion people have no toilet at home?
Underseer
Contributor
So India is like a Trump rally? No wonder some Hindus are turning to fascism.