PC con

[smiley]

Hi All
Not sure if any of you have had this happen. I hadn't heard anything on the grapevine so just letting you.
Saturday morning phone rings, very bad line indian woman I could here well, asking for hubby as he is the name on the broadband. After a while got the gist apparently thay had monitored our pc and were ringing to notify us a our pc had just picked up a very harmful virus. Passed phone to hubby and started the scan straight away.
I could hear him saying he couldn't understand her, then in he comes, (I have done this with virgin on the phone when they tell me to do things when pc goes haywire) Hubby sits down opens Google and starts typing, (Hubby doensn't do pc's) TEAMVIEWER.COM at this point I'm saying stop stop get them to tell us our details. He carries on I snatched the phone of him
CAN YOU CONFIRM OUR ACCOUNT DETAILS?
"PARDON" SAYS THE WOMAN
i REPEAT VERY SLOWLY "CAN YOU CONFIRM OUR ACCOUNT DETAILS"?

Down went the phone... not number left but made us believe they were Virgin....

It's a scam to link your pc to theirs I think then they can get money something like that..

 

[OmOnWeelz]

We don't accept any of these type of calls. I will not speak to banks, credit card companies, sales people or anyone else. If I fill in details on the web and give an email address and think we could possibly get phone calls I give our number as 01010101000 and I've changed utility acount details on line to that number as I've got _____ off by a constant round of sales calls wasting our time.
If you don't answer the calls you can't be conned. We have caller display enabled, if the number is not recognised we don't answer, it then goes to answer phone. I would say that 99.9% of callers never leave a message

 

[ProfJohnL]

HEllo Smiley

This is not a new scam, its been around for some time. Well done for spotting it though and cutting it off.

There have been news reports of some people who are usually not very pc savy falling for the scam, having all their personal data they hold on thier PC's being uploaded and varous account details being used to extract money from them.

General advice, is never to respond directly to a phone call of this nature, either ignore it completely, or check the validity of the caller, by ringing the numbers your service provider gives you when you origonally take out the agreement.

 

[smiley]

It took awhile for the penny to drop, we are x directory and don't give out our No.
So with them asking by name and knowing the provider and whose name the account is in they almost had us I have to say.

I can't take all the credit as our son was here too!

Live and learn.

 

[LMH]

Unfortunately, a friend of mine got caught by this scam and it cost them about £120.

 

[Ancientcaravanner]

The other variation on this scam is the "there is a fault on your PC you need to download this free software to fix it". The software corrupts your machine and they then tell you the problem is worse than they expected and it will cost you £xxx to fix it.