Beware! Scammers Calling You To Get Access To Your PC

In the last month, three of my customers have received calls from someone posing as a employee of a legitimate company who claimed that their “Windows PC” was either compromised with viruses or they were trying to protect them from a security threat. Thus they wanted to connect to their PC and help secure them. None of my customers took them up on their offer, but it’s clear that these guys were up to no good.

When I was told of this, I did some hunting around and found that this is not a new scam. News.com had a story about a similar scam back in 2011:

To run the con, criminals pretend to be PC security experts from legitimate companies. They call their intended victims, warning of a risky security threat and offering to run a free security checkup. If the victims take the bait, the scammers gain access to their PCs and often capture passwords or financial information.

The results are devastating:

Most of the victims (79 percent) said they were hit by some type of financial loss. Among those, 17 percent reported that they had money taken from their financial accounts, 19 percent said their passwords were stolen, and 17 percent found themselves the victims of identity fraud. More than half said they also ran into computer problems as a result of the scam.

The amount of money stolen per person ranged from $82 up to $1,560, while the cost of fixing the subsequent damage to the PC was $1,730 on average and as high as $4,800.

As you can see, this ends very badly for the victim.

The article goes on to explain that criminals are doing this because security software is making it harder and harder for them to do their evil from a distance. Thus they have to get their hands dirty. Seeing as this article was out in 2011, it’s a safe to say that we’re seeing a resurgence of this scan. If you receive one of these calls, simply hang up and continue about your day. While an ISP might contact you if your computer was infected with something (because it’s affecting their network), Microsoft and other similar companies would not. Thus, do not be fooled into handing over your personal info to these scammers. Instead, give them the boot.