Windows Phone Scam
I had a call about a windows phone scam last night.
The customer had a call from a man claiming to work for Microsoft. The man who had an indian accent said that he had had a call from the customer’s ISP (Internet Service Provider) about serious problems coming from their computer.
The indian sounding man then went on to ask the customer to open a program called the “windows event viewer”. Now, to the average computer user the contents of the event viewer can look to be rather worrying especially when the see the words ‘error’ and ‘warning.
Having seen some of the error messages the customer was convinced that they did indeed have a problem. The customer asked the indian man whether these error messages were the problem?.
“Yes, that’s it,” says the man. “Now let me guide you through the steps to fixing it.”
The customer was then directed to a website and told to download a a piece of software (a program) and install it. The customer is the directed to enter a six-digit code that allows the indian man to gain remote control of the computer, and the man proceeds to installs various “fixes” for the problem.
And now the time comes to pay pay a fee: £175 for a “subscription” to prevent the problem occuring again, a kind of preventative service .
The problem is that there was never anything wrong with the computer. The indian sounding man did not work for Microsoft or the internet service provider. What had happened was that the customer had given a complete strange access to every file, document and picture on her computer including folders containing ‘private and sensitive information’ !.
This customer is elderly and in-experienced, she was convinced by the authority of the man and very worried about the contents of the Windows Event Viewer. In actual fact, all computers using the Microsoft Windows operating system will show up these “errors” even though there is nothing wrong with the computer.
Another worrying point is that the indian call centre now have the lady’s bank details and if payment was made with a ban debit card there is little chance that the bank will reverse the payment for the customer to get her money back.
Please be careful with the windows phone scam because Microsoft will never make an unsolicited phone call to you.