We received a scam PC support call this week. Here are some
details.
Normally we would answer incoming calls as Ava. However for some
reason we did not. The caller said in a broken accent "Hello Mr
Peetman" (sic) and began to tell me my PC was running slow and was
infected with a virus and his companies' technicians could help me
out. Now it is true to say that my PC was running slow: however
this was because it was finishing doing its antivirus check (which
as usual returned zero infections).
I decided to string this guy along. A sort of good deed for the
day: whilst he was talking to me he was not calling some poor soul
who would be taken in by his spiel.
The pattern included:
We know that in the area of Henley on Thames there are "huge
amount of infections" (possibly true but doesn't mean my computers
are infected).
"Your ip address is blinking in red" (If so where and under what
circumstances?)
"On the main server" (Ok what main server? No answer here, so he
reverted to his script- to be honest I did not hear him actually
turning the pages, but there was a long pause and a change of
gears.)
"We are the people who look after all the computers in USA and
Canada and UK" (Well there is simply no such organisation.)
"We are authorised multinational company" (Presumably means that
the boss told him (authorised) him to do the scam and his boss is
one nationality and he is another?)
"This infection the red errors are boneaires, yellow warnings
are virus infections" (Oh well try as i might there is no such word
"boneaires" he spelt it out.) It is in the same category as "contrafibularities"
from Black Adder 3 - simply made up to annoy Samuel Johnson when he delivered
his first dictionary to the Prince Regent.
I was guided to a thing called the application log: this is (if
you don't know) a diary that the computer keeps. If there is a real
problem, then a well written program will report issues either back
to the developers, record them in the transaction log, or both. On
the other hand Viruses work by stealth and will not usually record
anything in this log if they can avoid it.
We often use information and warning entries when developing
service applications to note the status of the application under
test.
"Yellow warning are viruses" in the transaction log (just not
true, neither are the red.)
(when in application log viewer) "don't click on any of the
information entries: it will cause your machine to crash" (news to
me and every other developer)
(when in performance monitor) "tell me what CPU usage is reading
over the next 30 seconds: what was the last reading? That's the
important one." (news to me and every other developer.)
The company said they were "ClickToFix" and gave their phone
number as 02088199744 more here
Happy New Year