Hi folks,
Scammers are at it in full force these days. Just had a scam call from wherever
it is that they are operating.
The guy who called me had a very unclear Indian accent, claiming to be from
Microsoft, and said I had a virus that was transmitting weird messages all over
tha place. Having more than one computer functioning at the time, I asked him
which computer was exhibiting the problem. He said the second one. Then I told
him he had to be specific, as I had a number of virtual machines, all running
different versions of the Windows operating system.
Then he passed me to his "supervisor", who asked me to press Win+R, which
brought up the "Run" dialog-box, then asked me to type WWW.AMMYY.COM . I
refused (AMMYY is a legitimate piece of software to allow someone, like an
administrator or technician to gain control of your computer, in the right
context. However, legitimate or not, it is a scammer's best friend; the other
tools that scammers may use are logmein, supportme, etc). Then he asked me to
go to the Event Viewer, which displayed some error messages relating to some
issues I'd had in the past. He proceeded to alert me to the various red and
yellow flagged messages, which I knew what they were about anyway (hardware and
connectivity issues). I wanted to see how far he would go. Then he said he
would be able to fix up my computer and get rid of those errors, if I could
press Win+R and type http://www.ammyy.com/ . I hung up.
He called me again, and asked me why I had hung up. I told him that I had a
lot of trouble fixing a friend's computer (which I indeed had done, actually
last year) after scammers had had a go at, by re-installing the O/S etc, that
he up upto no good, that his motives were highly suspect, and that he was
indeed setting up a scam. This time, he hung up.
Take care and be safe this Christmas season.
Regards,
Gabriel.
