Dear Forum Members

Here's a report that shows that scammers are now setting up calling centres to cold call potential victims, all with the aim of stealing, or selling on, bank and/or credit card details.

Here is the news story: BBC News - Warning over anti-virus cold calls to UK internet users

I know of two guys at work that got cyber attacked last year, the first one ran a "so-called" online anti-virus utility which reported that his PC was swarming with viruses. Luckily for him he realised that the results were bogus and backed out of this AV utility.

The second guy was not so fortunate, his grown up kids uses his PC and so when he came across something online that claimed it would clean his machine he jumped at the opportunity.

He was first requested to load, unknown to him, malware onto his machine then call a telephone number. The people at the other end of the phone demanded £99.99 to clean his machine, they also claimed to be associated with Microsoft. When he refused to pay this money he and his family started to get threatening phone calls demanding payment (or else).

He took his PC to a friend that worked in the repair industry who found the PCs HD was riddled with malware. I understand that the PC had to be reformatted and it's software reinstalled.

As for the threatening calls, they stopped after this guy reported them, and this bogus organisation, to the police.



UK Bob