this was attempted on me today (i live in Australia).
i was very hesitant at first and thankfully i soon realized that it was a scam and did not install the teamveiwer program.
However i do feel terrible for anyone who falls victim to this.
They also tried this today on me (Australia)
We got me to open Start > run
As soon as he got me to open the eventviewer (I knew this was a scam as soon as he got me to start typing eventvwr in)
I told him that I had IT knowledge & there was nothing wrong with my PC & I wanted to speak to his manager & I asked him to direct me to his company's website but he continued to say "okay, okay, no problems, if you could just go to our website & download some software"
I just ended up telling him that I was too busy & not to call again
the one thing with teamviewer is that once you gave them your computer. They can disable your keyboard and mouse. Then the only thing to do is to shut down the computer.
i frequently get calls from "microsoft" and im told im using vista and to type event viewer in run . so i tell them thats not possible as im using linux and i hate microsoft and not to bother me any longer, this completely confuses the person on the other end as they dont have a script for this response ,it doesn't stop them calling but i get to play with them . haha!
It's a scam. They called me today (Australia) and id'd themselves as Microsoft, took me through the spiel about viruses etc which I was pretty skeptical about as I have a Norton running. As soon as they told me to go a third party site, I clicked (mentally) and googled it rather than go directly to it as they were telling me to. The google result immediately identified the site as selling remote access programs! I asked why they would send me to a third party site if they were MS and they denied saying that they were. I called them out on being scammers and got hung up on!
Thing to note / alarm bells:
The definitely ID themselves as MS and they were calling about errors reporting on my computer.
Having said that, my first suspicion was that that was excellent customer service. (HA!)
Indian(?) accent but ok english skills.
They also were unaware of which OS I was using even though they claimed to be reporting the errors to me.
Their knowledge of Windows was average.
The fact that I already has a decent virus suite running and that they were claiming major virus issues.
Obviously the big one is that they expect you to go to a 3rd party site (ie: non-Microsoft) to resolve the issue and download a remote access program.
Luckily for me, I'm not that dumb otherwise...
Last edited by SteamTemplar; 11 Feb 2011 at 04:28. Reason: Additional detail
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