Musings from a small IPP

So when someone phones you up, saying they are a Microsoft Technician, or someone employed by Microsoft you can be sure it is a fraud attempt. I suggest you say “Hold on a moment, be right back” and put aside the phone without hanging up so that their bill keeps growing.

The current scam is quite clever. The caller will ask you to run a program “eventvwr” which will show you the log events handled by your operating system in normal operation. They will then try to convince you this demonstrates a problem that you should pay them to help you fix.

Typically they will ask for £49 for a program for you to download. This is a really bad idea, you do not want this malware on your computer, or to give them your credit card number.

Microsoft have a system called “Microsoft Updates” for sending you patches and fixes , which you should be running regularly anyway,and the £50 the caller is asking you for is about the same amount that you paid for the Windows Operating System, bundled with your computer.

I’ve just had an e-mail arrive in my SPAM folder that looks extremely dangerous.

It purports to be from the British Red Cross appealing for Japan, but

• The Red Cross were on the radio yesterday explaining that their priority is currently the Libyan refugee crisis.
• The email originated in China.
• The payment method was Moneybookers (an alarm bell all by itself)
• The payee was a personal account
• The Payee should have been the Red Cross
• No off-line donation methods listed, such as bank transfers, telephone with credit card, or local collections.

We are tagging these as SPAM, but do watch out

As one might imagine, we are long-term exponents of open-source.  We don’t use Microsoft product, so it’s quite amusing to be Phoned up out of the blue to be told we have a windows virus.   Really rather difficult on UNIX systems 😀

To be fair to the gentleman introducing himself as Michael Narona he did call my private line, and thought he was talking to a domestic consumer, but he did have my name which is annoying.  As it was immediately clear to me this was a scam I decided to see what information I might get to pass on to the police.   Enjoy the audio recording

You’ll notice he introduces himself as being from

“The online technical support department of your computer”

and absolutely will not give me a company name, and is extremely reluctant to give me a number on which he can be called back.  The incoming call had CLI suppressed.

If nothing else I kept him from scamming others for 6 minutes.