Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room
Phone scam - pretending to be Microsoft Engineer
tomos:
^ great to hear someone got their money back. I would have thought that if they are able to debit your credit card that they would have to at least have a business address. But I guess that probably wouldn't mean much anyways...
Trouble is it is difficult to tell where the scammers are based as I have come across a variety of accents!!!
-Carol Haynes (May 24, 2011, 08:48 PM)
--- End quote ---
accents wouldnt necessarily indicate location anyways.
cpt.deckard:
I've just had a call from a friend describing how their distraught daughter has had her computer "hacked" AND it was a phone call from a Microsoft Engineer that told her so...
...the "MS Engineer" then went on to tell her how to remove the virus from her machine and, no doubt, do several other things to it as the same time. Oh, they also told her that her "operating system license" had expired and so would need to renew it for the cost of £150.
Obviously, this is a total scam aimed at the non security savvy pc user. I've told her to change all usernames and passwords, etc. and will be wiping/restoring the hard drive for them later.
Seems it's a growing problem: http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/2042862/windows-users-targeted-phone-scam
(No doubt, there are better links and information elsewhere.)
-nudone (May 24, 2011, 06:15 AM)
--- End quote ---
growing problem indeed, these bastards are going global, check out some of the comments and videos on this page:
http://callercenter.com/800-698-9034.html
ewemoa:
The July 2012 SANS OUCH! issue (PDF) - "The Tech-Support Phone Call Scam" seems to be related -- via http://www.securingthehuman.org/resources/newsletters/ouch
nite_monkey:
It would be funny to make a linux box look as close a possible to a windows distro, and give them access to that, and see what happens from there... ;)
SeraphimLabs:
It would be funny to make a linux box look as close a possible to a windows distro, and give them access to that, and see what happens from there... ;)
-nite_monkey (July 09, 2012, 04:27 AM)
--- End quote ---
Mintbox. Or one of the mint-named Linux distros is designed to be easily adapted to be Windows-like.
I like the idea of turning them loose in a VM though. Because while they are busy, I run netstat on the router to pick up the IP they came in from in order to file an abuse report with their ISP.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version