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

Sounds a little bit like what happened to me earlier this year.

First time I got a call from someone claiming to be from Microsoft, saying that they had detected (magically lol) that my computer wasn't running as well as it could & was infected. I told them that I knew it was a scam & to p!ss off.

Second time was after I'd just moved house & had been temporarily given another phone number - same kind of spiel about infected computer. This time I asked them how MS knew my computer was infected since I used a Mac. They hung up on me

Well Birdy

It shows that this cold calling scam is happening all over the world and are primarily aimed at the unwary, desperate or gullible windows user (I know, you have to be gullible in the first place to use windows ).

However, the reason why these sort of rip-off scams keep growing and multiplying is because it is all too easy to steal from windows computer users without the fear of being caught, especially when you have a government, like the UK, that seem to sanction privacy crooks like Phorm.



UK Bob

I have a cold reception to all marketing phone calls lol. They love me, that's why they call me from morning to evening & even on weekends. lol Something really needs to be done to allow a person control over phone calls. Should we have to pay more money to do this though? It should be an option to everyone.

I've been aware for years that telephone companies sell numbers to marketing companies. Likewise some websites do the same with both email & ip addresses.

As for popup windows or other ads on web pages saying your pc is infected, get a fix here, etc. Well on a mac I just laugh sarcastically at their petty attempts. But obviously a lot of people do get caught on these scams.