On Wed, 06 Aug 2014 20:38:26 -0700, Larry Jaques wrote:

I was sitting at the computer this morning when the phone rang. It
was the Windows Microsoft Technical Department? He told me that my
computer had been acting up and he was calling to fix it for me.
He said he had the computer's personal identification number, specific
to each and every computer. Nobody but registered technicians and me
had the number. He had me open a DOS cmd window and type "assoc",
which brought up what looked like file associations. He pointed me to
the longest line and had me follow it as he read it off, matching it
digit for digit. My Bull**** Meter was pegged by this time, but it
was a pretty convincing scam. I asked him why both he, the
supervisor, and his young techie were both sporting eastern Indian
accents and calling from Texas instead of Silicon Valley or Redmond.

I said "No, I'm not comfortable continuing this dialog." so he
proceeds to tell me that they cannot be held responsible for anything
that happens, that the hacker is hacking away at my computer as we
speak. By this time, I had "zfsendtotarget" googled up and it was
warning about others of his type doing this scam, and that the clsid
of that target is the same on every computer, that these guys want to
sell you a very expensive malware suite and/or put a healthy virus on
your computer.

If I hadn't just had a recent run-in with a virus attempt, I would
have quickly told him to bugger off. But he had me (cautiously) going
there for a few minutes.

Be warned, these assholes are out there and seem to be multiplying.
It's too bad one can't send a 750KV spike direct to their computer or
phone during one of these attempts, isn't it?

We've recieved several of these "Microsoft Techincal Support" calls over
the last couple years. I generally just hang up on them; but in one
instance, I told the caller that I needed them to identify which one
of the systems that were on my LAN (varies from 3-10 on a given day) was
the one they had identified as the problem? The woman caller answered:
"Huh?", then hung up. Guess she didn't want to help me find that
inffested computer after all? ;-)

We got the first "IRS" scam call on our answering machine a few days
ago. Interestingly, this call used a "synthesized" voice - not a real
person, or recroding of a real person's voice. The call warned that
the (unidentified) matter was "extremely urgent", and stated they would
initiate legal action against me if I did not immediately return their
call by calling their "hot line" number. Their message concluded,
hilariously, with "have a wonderful day".

Good for some laughs; but I worry about elderly people falling for these
kinds of scams.

BTW, I recall reading somewhere, a warning that these IRS scammers can
fake/trick the caller ID to make it appear that the incoming call was
from the IRS.
--
Email address is a Spam trap.