Dell & Event Viewer Scam

[rkl122]

Sorry if I'm in the wrong place, but the Dell community site has shut down it's thread on this and I know there are a lot of knowledgeable people here. (I can't seem to log in there anyway, even though I have a valid Dell customer account. (Their "community" is a separate login from their "customer" account.)). This is not about Win 7 per se, although I am running Windows 7 x64.

Last night, I got a call from a guy who represented himself as being from Dell, and said my computer had been taken over by a bot and was causing havoc on the Internet. He sounded just like Dell support sounds when you call them. He knew my name. He knew my Dell model. He had me look at the event viewer, and pointed out the errors that are in there as indicative of the problem. He then wanted remote access to my computer, at which point I terminated the call. Today, Dell support confirms that they did not make this call. I have done some reading, and I understand that scaring folks with event viewer errors is a common scam. But here's the catchy part: this guy knew the ID tag string on my Dell computer. That's a unique ID that Dell assigns to each computer they sell. I have found one other thread where somebody reported the same thing, but it was in the Dell community, and Dell closed the thread.

Here's my question: how could this guy have known that tag string? Dell support today, when I called, said hackers have a way of getting to that. Could that be true? Personally I don't believe it. I rather suspect that Dell has had a major information breach, and won't admit it. I was just wondering if anyone here knows any more about this.

Incidentally, FWIW, I've been running checks all day and so far find no infection on my computer.

Thanks for any insight.

 

[fireberd]

Dell had a 3rd party computer support company in India (not very long as they dumped them in a couple of months) that was using that to scam people. When Dell found out they were dumped.

I had a call about my PC from "Tech Support". My PC is not a brand name PC, it was built by me. I hung up on the caller and nothing was compromised.

My neighbor had a call and fell victim to one of these scams. The neighbor had an older (Windows XP) HP desktop computer.

 

[rkl122]

Dell had a 3rd party computer support company in India (not very long as they dumped them in a couple of months) that was using that to scam people. When Dell found out they were dumped. ..........

So maybe they pulled a "Snowden" on Dell?

Here is the thread I referred to above:
CRITICAL: Security Breach with Dell Ticketing System!!! - Customer Care - Forum - USA Customer Care Board - Dell Community
Notice how Dell closed that thread. There are various reports like this, but few reporting that the caller knew the actual id tag. I'm still wondering how he could know this by simple hacking, as Dell support represents to me.

If this is as serious a breach of Dell's customer database as it appears to be, I'm not understanding why there's so little discussion of it around the net.

 

[fireberd]

The 3rd party company I was referring to was canned at least 5 years ago. However, isolated incidents could still be happening from it. Being its at least 5 years ago and a foreign company, probably nothing Dell (or anyone) can do about it.

The PC you have is probably from that timeframe.

 

[Computer0304]

Or the person could have been a ex-employee of Dell's current tech support. I assume this happens because either they want to get revenge from getting fired by threatening Dell customers or he could have quit to start his own scamming company with the knowledge of Dell he has. Or he can just be part of that scam computer "support" company. Either way, it is bad. In fact, companies will barely even call for actually helping you. Usually, it is just advertisement on some kind of new product or sale. I just don't answer unknown numbers at all, especially if it is claiming to be a legit company. If I get repeat calls from the number, I look up the number in case it is real and if it is, call back and ask them if they have called me before since the scammers might fake their number.