Teamviewer scam - beware

Yes, I could see Teamviewer is legit. But it just seemed like this guy was trying to to gain access to my computer since he called me and not the other way around. I figured other people had experienced this before and had posted about it.

Well I just received this call.

First, it showed up as "0" on my caller ID, when I answered, it rang as if -I- were calling. A man answered with "Hello?".. So that was odd, but when I said hello back, he went into action.

He had an Indian accent but knew English very well. I've called Microsoft customer support plenty of times to know that, that's what Microsoft sounds like. He told me that my computer has been sending many error reports to Windows. I replied with "There are several computers in this household, you'll have to be more specific". He seemed a little confused, but then proceeded with saying "The computer registered to <my first name> <my middle initial> <my last name>." This immediately struck me as odd because while I do register my computers with Microsoft, I have never issued my middle initial. The only places my middle initial exists are on government forms (Birth certificate, SSN, voter's registration, selective service, tax forms, drivers license), college ID and paperwork, and my bank. Not that Im surprised he had the info, just that if he was really just going off of what my computer registered to Microsoft is telling him, he shouldn't know my middle initial. So, with that and the initial "0" on the caller ID, I figured this was a scam.. But I'm a little wise, so I kept going.

He asked me to pull up my Computer Management window, look at my error logs under event viewer and Applications, filter the logs to critical and error, and again very many of those. He asked me to goto the website Teamviewer.com and for me to join a remote control session, and that's when I hung up. In retrospect I should have grilled him about it being a scam and see if he hung up first. I suspect these errors are manually generated from some sort of spyware. I don't think TeamViewer is a scamming website from what I can tell, but that scammers are using this software to their advantage.

They tried it with me a few months ago. I kept them on the phone for a while, made it sound as though I had no Windows knowledge whatsoever. Answering with things like "How do I right-click?".

I was following their instructions VERY carefully!

Then, when it came to them asking for my TeamViewer ID (which I've used for years without any issues), I started to spell "F......U.....C........"

Well.... I think you can guess the rest!?

Deergoodness!

Thanks for all of the awesome posts from you guys.

A while ago they called and my Dad answered. Thank goodness he's pretty smart, he felt something was fishy and hung up, checked with me about it later. He figured if it was really important they would call back.

They did call back. I answered, got the same response pretty much as koreiryuu. "hello" and then into the speel as soon as I responded. I listened..." your computer is downloading dangerous files and is infected" and also " I can tell you are a very knowledgeable user" Darn right. I asked 'so Why wouldn't avast and avg pick this up?' He couldn't give a strait answer. ' do you know what AVG is?' he said yes but gave me the wrong answer. ' do you know what avast is?' he did get that one right but still didn't expand beyond saying it was an antivirus, and that this is a much more dangerous problem then a virus! ' so is it Malware?' I asked. No, much more dangerous then malware. What the? how is it downloading onto my pc then? I then also pointed out, as he is trying to tell me to look at my keyboard,' which computer are you referring too..I have 3.' he says the one with windows. ' they all three have windows' He gave some other weird answer.

Long story short, after going through his little demonstration of showing the infected files, he directed me to the software website and I did a scam search instead. ' why does every search I'm looking up say you guys are a scam?' totaly blew me off, pretended I didn't say a thing, I notified him I can a search and asked again and when he tried encouraging me to trust him i replied ' not today' and hung up.

I knew it had too manny issues not to be a scam, but I do like back checking things to be sure, so I was very happy to read these posts and get reassured on what I thought and clarification on how these people are working. Thanks all.