Woman Targeted By Microsoft Impersonators

Megalith

Megalith

24-bit/48kHz
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Aug 20, 2006
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Not that any of you would fall for this, but tech support scams are alive and well. Have you ever gotten one of these calls?

"There was this gentleman that claimed he was calling from Microsoft Windows and that my computer had been hacked,” Martha said. “He had been notified about numerous people and I was one of them." Martha said the man told her to go to her computer so he could show her who hacked her.
 
I still get those calls as well as the air duct cleaning...construction..alarm..cruise and carpet cleaning scams....enough people fall for them that they stay un business. :mad:
 
What I say to these people when they call cannot be repeated in writing. Lets just say it involves horse biology.

I know it don't matter, but man does it feel good.
 
Kibbles said:
I still get those calls as well as the air duct cleaning...construction..alarm..cruise and carpet cleaning scams....enough people fall for them that they stay un business. :mad:
Click to expand...

And lets not forget Carmen with Card Services. That broad really gets around.
 
TechLarry said:
And lets not forget Carmen with Card Services. That broad really gets around.
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We get Heather from Credit Card Services...I have a 6 month and a 45 year old phone number...both get calls from scammers.
 
My landlady suffered these. When she was explaining the calls to me, it was immediately obvious what a scam it was, but she just couldn't seem to grasp it. It is frustrating for me, and scary for her. I hate these predators with a passion. They deserve to die.
 
If you fall for scams like Microsoft calling you, then you are too dumb to own a computer, educate yourself.

That being said, these scammers are absolute scum.
 
They got my mother-in-law with this one.. They call my mom all the time, she tells them she does not own a computer (which she does not).. I want them to call me so I can string them along.. lol.. Make it look like they have a competing virus/trojan that is hijacking their commands.
 
I have had this call too,told him I use Ubuntu Linux
And the IRS called and they were going to send the local police to come pick me up if I did not pay right away.
Yesterday I received the call from Obamacare for me to sign up.

Why don't people just go get a real job?
 
Wolfkin said:
If you fall for scams like Microsoft calling you, then you are too dumb to own a computer, educate yourself.

That being said, these scammers are absolute scum.
Click to expand...

I was wondering when a dumb comment like this would come along, good thing I was not disappointed. :D Scams are nothing new, folks have been falling for scams long before computers where ever around and that does not make someone dumb.
 
Wolfkin said:
If you fall for scams like Microsoft calling you, then you are too dumb to own a computer, educate yourself.

That being said, these scammers are absolute scum.
Click to expand...

I hope someone scams you when you are elderly and on a fixed income. Yeah it's the victims fault, not the person committing fraud. How dare they send an email or Skype with distant relatives to stay connected.
 
I have my wife well trained, she just tells them that she'll have her IT person look at it :)
 
I get calls from "Bob" and "John" all the time trying to send me white papers on ERP systems. SO frustrating! But yes, these do happen a lot. One of my co-workers called me way after hours saying someone from HP called them, had them run netstat, then told them that 127.0.0.1 was someone trying to hack their computer. Sigh. They were almost at the point of installation of who knows what and paying 50$ for support when they stopped and asked again how their phone number was linked to the computer. This person is not the brightest bulb, that's for damn sure.

We also got wire fraud scams a ton, implemented some different things to stop them though as people were to close to responding.
 
chrispix said:
They got my mother-in-law with this one.. They call my mom all the time, she tells them she does not own a computer (which she does not).. I want them to call me so I can string them along.. lol.. Make it look like they have a competing virus/trojan that is hijacking their commands.
Click to expand...

One of my buddies had them on the phone back and forth with his wife for 2 hours, they thought it was hilarious. I couldn't stand anywhere near that amount of time, but it is pretty funny.
 
I get these once a month, I mess with them a lot. You want to shut them up, just say you run Linux. I have had the full range of reactions from me messing with them, from them saying they were going to blow my head off to one guy actually started crying about how poor India is.........really, your scamming people and you don't have thicker skin? wow
 
They've called me a couple times.
I've strung them along a little, but either they or I give up too easily and the call is done too quickly.

Here's one call from memory:
Them: <thick Indian accent> "Hello, this is Microsoft computer support. We were informed that your computer has a virus."
me: "Oh really?! That's not good." (playing dumb)
Them: "Yes, we can fix your computer and remove the virus."
me: "You can? OK."
Them: "Yes, we can remove the virus from your computer. Are you at your computer?"
me: "Yes."
Them: "OK, turn it on."
me: "It's already on." (shouldn't they already know this?)
me: "Hey, can you tell me what IP address my computer is? How do you know the virus is on my computer?"
Them: "Yes, the IP is 192.168.100.10" (the last 2 octets they told me might have been different but it doesn't matter)
me: "Hmm. You know that IP address cannot be routed over the internet, right?"
Them: <click, hangup>
me: "Aww."
 
Azrak said:
They've called me a couple times.
I've strung them along a little, but either they or I give up too easily and the call is done too quickly.

Here's one call from memory:
Them: <thick Indian accent> "Hello, this is Microsoft computer support. We were informed that your computer has a virus."
me: "Oh really?! That's not good." (playing dumb)
Them: "Yes, we can fix your computer and remove the virus."
me: "You can? OK."
Them: "Yes, we can remove the virus from your computer. Are you at your computer?"
me: "Yes."
Them: "OK, turn it on."
me: "It's already on." (shouldn't they already know this?)
me: "Hey, can you tell me what IP address my computer is? How do you know the virus is on my computer?"
Them: "Yes, the IP is 192.168.100.10" (the last 2 octets they told me might have been different but it doesn't matter)
me: "Hmm. You know that IP address cannot be routed over the internet, right?"
Them: <click, hangup>
me: "Aww."
Click to expand...

Yeah, I tried the whole non route-able thing with them and he just didn't get what I was telling him. I'm going to do something like this next time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_ll_qnBNTY
 
I've had a bunch of these, I think my wife got us put on their do not call lists, because she was too abrasive. I enjoyed trolling them if they called at a good time, boot a ms-dos vm and read the screen for them... Or I wanted to screen read zork, but couldn't find it in the time I could stall them...
 
is it me or is the womans story telling lacking an importen part wher she did something stupid and apperantly left it out

cause otherwise Im having a hard time think she turned it on and it was immediately under hsi control. If so WHY did he need to call her in the first place.
Clearly she is leaving out the part where the fake support ask her to install or run some program. otherwise this make no sense to be called if you are already hacked by the caller when you tunr on the screen.


A friend if mine got targeted by this shit too though it was a fake Dell supporter not Microsoft. luckily he stopped before they got into his computer and asked me for advice.
 
Older, computer illiterate people like this woman really should be using Macs. It's very hard to screw anything up or fall victim to malware or scams like this on a Mac.
 
I got my first one of these a couple of months ago, unfortunately I was a bit distracted and it set off the rage mode within so I just louded him out with a bunch of profanities and hung up on him. Wish I would have trolled :(
 
Wolfkin said:
If you fall for scams like Microsoft calling you, then you are too dumb to own a computer, educate yourself.

That being said, these scammers are absolute scum.
Click to expand...
sooooo with this logic would you also be saying that "If you fall for scams like card services calling you, then you are too dumb to live, go kill yourself" ?
 
The last scammer that called me was claiming she was from the U.S. Grant Department and I had been awarded a $9,000 grant. I responded:

"I'm so glad you called. I was getting hungry. Can I have a 100% grass fed slaughtered cow burger, garlic fries and a large milk shake delivered?"

"Go fuck yourself."

*click*
 
Cmdrmonkey said:
Older, computer illiterate people like this woman really should be using Macs. It's very hard to screw anything up or fall victim to malware or scams like this on a Mac.
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Actually I have had sever older clients that have macs that fell for this and let the people into their mac computers.
 
ManofGod said:
I was wondering when a dumb comment like this would come along, good thing I was not disappointed. :D Scams are nothing new, folks have been falling for scams long before computers where ever around and that does not make someone dumb.
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If you think Microsoft will call you and tell you that you have a virus, then yes you are dumb and ignorant and don't know enough to use an internet connected computer. End of story.
 
Wolfkin said:
If you think Microsoft will call you and tell you that you have a virus, then yes you are dumb and ignorant and don't know enough to use an internet connected computer. End of story.
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Glad you do not seem to be in the IT field working with real people then. If you are, I feel sorry for them since they do not know what you really think about them.
 
I had gotten one of these calls recently. A fellow with poor english skills. The moment he claimed to be working for Microsoft, which was pretty quick, I hung up.
 
John721 said:
Just listened to that. Comedy gold! Nice job.
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Heh. Thanks. I love the part where he gets all flustered when I ask him if his name is Susan for the second time. :D

Lucas Hood said:
Hysterical!! You need to send that to Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon.
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I keep meaning to make a youtube video with it. I have a bunch of photos of angry tech support people to use as a slideshow; I just keep getting sidetracked with other projects.

Note: I posted that from a temporary account; Kyle has since helped me reclaim my original account (in case you were wondering why I'm replying with a different name).
 
Lucas Hood said:
I get random calls from unknown numbers that never leave voicemails. I never answer a call from an unrecognized number.
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This happens on our old landline, even though I switched the number over to VOIP.

Now that we have caller ID, we usually just let it go to voice mail unless we know the number (which means the number is programed into the list on our phone system). Most the time they hang up rather then leave a message. If we get more than one call from the same number, we add it to the blocked call list on the phone system, so the next time they call, it rings once and then hangs up on them :)
 
Not hacked by ms employees but I had my one drive corrupted when I missed a payment because I forgot to change the credit card after the new card came. Pretty sure most of the cs are fine and one in ten are simply there to collect personal data and sell it like they used to do with email lists sold to spammers. They used to require an independent company to bond employees so that when they went to the next company the company's who lost the bond over the corp theft would simply refuse to bond them again.

Too bad there was more demand for cheap cs than there was supply of people willing to work for minimum wage to about twenty five dollars an hour, so they have to drop the bond requirements to fill the seats.
 
This is such a big problem in the part of Canada where I live that everyone I know has gotten at least one of these calls. It's bad enough that it's been all over the papers and TV news so even my completely tech illiterate relatives know about it. I've gotten a few and I mostly just hang up. There is almost no way to trace the calls because the telephone system allows anyone to impersonate anyone else and has no security at all. I wish they'd fix that.

I've actually installed a program on my phone that filters out all phone numbers based on criteria and sends them straight to voicemail if they're on the list of "bad actors" or the phone number is impossible. I've also added any phone numbers that start with the local area code but don't start with 1, which all US/Canadian phone numbers do which is something the scammers around here like to do. This really works because most of their phone systems only try a number 5 times before giving up if it goes instantly to voicemail every time. The app is called "Truecaller" for Android if anyone is curious.
 
I get people coming in to have their computers fixed after these events.
Unlike here, in this forum, most people have no clue about their computer.
Most treat it like an appliance, and no more.
The scam continues, because it works...
 
Wolfkin said:
If you think Microsoft will call you and tell you that you have a virus, then yes you are dumb and ignorant and don't know enough to use an internet connected computer. End of story.
Click to expand...

Umm, actually it does happen similar to this at times. It might not be MS but it isn't an impossibility.

I was doing some work for a small civil engineering firm, they were having some troubles and asked for some help. Turns out that their own previous IT guy had set his son, (a Marine), up with a company user account so he could have an email server to use from open wifi networks. The boy could'a been using gmail but wtf, even IT guys get dumb. The kid picked up a virus and was now a spambot pushing his spam through our email server. Our ISP picked up the traffic, cut us off and blacklisted our IP until we could deal with it.

I got the guys account cut out and set up some filtering rules and called the ISP and had them monitor us for a bit and turn us back on. But I also called the old IT dude and told him what had happened, he tried to say he didn't think that was what was going on but I didn't let that bullshit ride. He never should have done what he did and he knew it. These small timers sometimes are pretty bad and really take advantage of small businesses sometimes.
 
Cmdrmonkey said:
Older, computer illiterate people like this woman really should be using Macs. It's very hard to screw anything up or fall victim to malware or scams like this on a Mac.
Click to expand...

A Mac won't protect a person from this type of scam any more than a Windows or Linux computer will. The vulnerability here is not the operating system, it's the computer user. The scammers convince the user to install and configure remote control software, often a commercially available program such as Team Viewer. Once that's done, the scammers have unrestricted access to at least that account on the computer.

It doesn't matter what kind of lock you have on the door if you unlock the door and let the thief into your house...
 
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