This is also what happened to me. They said that they were from Microsoft support. I went a little further and asked these scammers how much they would charge to fix the errors. They said that I would have to pay $79 per year to them to keep my computer clean. I told them that I could do it myself free of charge, and hung up on them. Please beware. These outfits are quite rampant in India. Their targets are mostly NRIs.
Cheers, Santosh ----- Original Message ----- > From: Gabriel de Figueiredo <[email protected]> > To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> > Cc: > Sent: Tuesday, December 18, 2012 11:17 PM > Subject: [Goanet] AMMYY scam > > 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. >
