The Camaro Club (UK)

I think this was someone trying to hack my computer with my help.

Last Saturday morning the phone rang, I did´nt get to it soon enough to answer.
When the misses came in she called the telephone company because it was an odd number,
0019, just that, the prefix for Cuba.
Later it called again, it was a call from "Microsoft" and he could only speak English but with a heavy accent which I concluded was Indian or Pakistani.
He told me my computer was, and had been for a long time, sending them a signal
indicating my computer was infected with a bad virus and was transmitting it.
The virus, he told me, would get by my antivirus protection.
He wanted me to go online and start a search in my computer for the virus, under his instructions.
I asked who he was and where was he calling from, it was a very bad line and
his accent was dreadful.
He told me he was calling from Scotland, to which I replied no, he could´nt be as
lines from the UK were never like this one.
I put the phone down and he called back most indignant I had hung up, so I hung up again.
I have an incident number with the telephone company and it won´t be until next week that they can see the number in full that called.

Today Sunday, telephone tech services said they´d never heard of such an occurrence and I should inform the police when the number calling is known.

Spoke to Microsoft Spain this afternoon, any contact with them has to be initiated by the customer first.
They gave me an incident number and will be updated when I know more.
They told me they just don´t ring out of the blue.

about 3 years ago someone hacked into my ebay account and sold 10 x mac laptops at £500 a piece....
couldnt use my ebay account for about 2 weeks and at that time a 69 camaro was for sell about 2 mile from me and i couldnt bid

I´ve since found out this is a known scam.
They get into your computer with your help and then the last instructions wipe out
the history so you cannot prove it.

I did have my e mail account hacked last year, I think they gave up as it is so boring.

Some of the things those ba***rds try now is shocking.. I just worry some old folk are just too trusting and give out info 'cos the nice young man on the phone sounded so friendly'.....

The keystroke logger viruses that are the danger.. One of the reasons I moved to a Mac years ago... I don't like Apple products in general but they seem less prone to viruses..

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“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.”

Ye it is quite a common scam - in a nutshell it's ransom based and credit card phishing. They call up, tell you of an issue, get you to get them to remotely access your pc, they make it look like they're doing something helpful, actually they're installing software that locks you out of your pc and that's where the ransom comes in. They ask for £x (under £100 usually) for them to unlock it, then they either charge that, end of story, you've been scammed through naivety so you're none the wiser, or they use your credit / debit card details and raid your account. Horrible stuff. I had one of these calls and happened to be employed by Microsoft at the time, simply told the person on the phone that and they hung up pretty quick. There was an internal email going around at the time too, mentioning about it and the bottom line was that MS never contacts customers, full stop.
Happened to my dad a few weeks ago He got the call and he just happened to have installed a new version of Windows a few days before and was having trouble activating it, so the call was coincidental and in favour of the scammer. They did the remote access thing, told him it was free help, locked the pc and demanded a ransom for unlocking it. Luckily he was stubborn and didnt pay, so didn't hand over any details and as it was a new installation, he could just reinstall Windows and it wasn't an issue.

If you're interested in scaring yourself about how fragile our digital world is, but sold to as super secure etc - this is a great video! Quite amazing how easy it is to break digital systems.

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