Scargill

Well, that was good fun.

This morning, Maureen received a call from "Windows Technical Support in London" – the third this week… and of course she knew it’s a scam and passed the call to me to have some fun.

An Indian lady responds to say that this is about virii on our computer. I played along. I asked her if this was Microsoft support, she was quite shirty, no this was Windows support. I asked her what information she needed from me. Nothing, she said – we have all the information we need. She asked me to go to the computer and press the start button.

Essentially the goal is to take you to the prefetch directory or similar where you’ll see a load of files that don’t mean much – and she’ll try to convince you that this is malware and for a small sum…..
I stretched it out as long as I possibly could while Maureen and I had a good laugh, then asked her if she slept at night and ended the call by making some rude suggestions before closing the call while she was in mid-sentence.

This was extremely funny but there is a serious side – some older folk might be taken in by this scam which is as old as the Nigerian one…

If you get this – play along and then when she (or he) asks you to press the start button – act dumb and then tell them your computer doesn’t have a start button but has lots of pretty coloured boxes… just for a laugh. Then say the plug has come out and can they wait a second for you to reboot. Put the phone to one side and go get lunch.

One clever fellow on the web made a recording of the whole thing in his case (I really do need an instant record button for these calls). Here it is.. enjoy.

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-04/11/malwarebytes