http://disqus.com/by/gallicgirl/enSat, 18 Apr 2009 14:52:29 -0000https://www.digitaltoast.co.uk/supportonclick-systemrecure-scam#comment-8334716<p>I've just come off the phone with another Indian gentleman. I'm an expat Brit living in Florida, but somehow the guy knew my name.... I asked him if he was calling from India and he said, no, from New York. Said my computer was running slowly and that they'd been working on a global survey. Said I should go onto the computer and he would give me support over the telephone. He said they had received several reports in the last month or two of people having these problems with their computers, especially if they were running Windows 2000 or Windows XP. I asked him if he knew what operating system I was using and he said, "Windows XP?" Told him, no, sorry, I'm using Vista - at which he didn't skip a beat, but said that they supported that, too, and that there were problems with that also. Hmmm</p><p>I told him that since his call had come up as "unknown" (which here, usually means either from a call centre where the number is not available, or from overseas - my son lives back in the UK so I'm familiar with the different messages on my caller ID) I had no way of knowing who he was and was not therefore going to go on line with him on the phone. He was certainly persistent - the phone rang once and I got a phone ringing tone and then I heard this guy with terrible background noise on the phone. Told him I couldn't hear him so he called back, same again. A "colleague" then called - better line, but there was a satellite echo - I'm not sure how he thought I would believe his story about calling from NY.</p><p>He then said, OK disconnect from the internet and I'll go through it with you - we offer telephone tech support. I decided this was rather strange, but said, OK, I'll have a look, once I've disconnected everything. I duly disconnected all modems etc so there was no way he could access the machine. He then went through a procedure where I should look at the Computer system management log - if there were more than five red (error) messages, then the computer was badly infected.....! I must surely have lots of junk files and probably some virus files in there which would cause my computer to crash at any time.</p><p>Of course the next thing was that he said if I would go online, he would go through the procedure to sort the computer out. I said that sorry, but there was no way I was going to go online with someone who I didn't know, as I had no way of verifying who he was and that I was not going to give access to my computer to ANYONE I don't know.</p><p>He then said I could go online and google them (Suppport on Click) to see who they were, and gave me a telephone number on which I could call him back. The number was somewhat interesting as it was neither a standard US number, nor an 800 (or 866) free phone number. He said his name was Enrique and his colleague's name was James. (Hmmm.... yes, sure) I said I'd check them out and call back. Of course, I shan't be calling back.</p><p>I'm very tempted to send a copy of this to Microsoft, though I'm sure they must have had reports on these people by now.</p><p>Anyway, hope this helps anyone who's also been contacted by these people - they're obviously working their way through US telephone nos too. Just don't give access to your machine to anyone other than your usual tech support (and even then, only on a limited, as necessary, case by case basis).</p>gallicgirlSat, 18 Apr 2009 14:52:29 -0000