Don’t always believe what you’re told!
Yesterday I had a second call from an Indian sounding gentleman trying to tell me that he knew that my computer was running slowly and needed to be fixed. And he had something to do with providing “Microsoft services” (huh?!)…
“Oh yeah, right”, I thought, “I’ve got nothing to do at the moment, so let’s see where this goes….”
Turns out he know my surname and address, but nothing else that would make his story even remotely plausible to me as something of a relative computer expert, but I could imagine others that don’t quite know as much being suckered in. He spoke in kind of technobabble that made no actual technical sense but might have almost sounded right to an untrained person. But he was very persistent in talking absolute rubbish. Long past where I thought he would have realised that I’d made him as a very dodgy caller indeed.
I dug around on the net afterwards, and the only references to the outfit, apart from their own website (which I wasn’t prepared to visit for safety reasons) were either on a whole lot of self-published press release sites, or on tech forums telling of how people had been ripped off by them. And they seem to target anywhere around the world. Aussie, UK, Canada, the US. Anywhere.
I’m not willing to put the company name here, as I’m pretty sure they have related people searching the net for references to them and bizarrely trying to post a “oh wow this company helped me oh so much they were just great” message right in the middle of a whole stream of people proving just how much of a scam it all is.
So if you get a call like that, ignore it. Or ask me first!! Don’t visit any site they ask you to, don’t give them your credit card details (duh!), and don’t type anything into your computer.
It’s all just a scam, but a clever, worrying one.