Re: Phone call

[Paul Ferguson <fergdawgster () gmail com>]

An old fraud, but apparently still going strong:

http://www.snopes.com/fraud/telephone/microsoft.asp

- ferg


On Fri, Jul 15, 2011 at 6:52 AM, Drsolly <drsollyp () drsolly com> wrote:

> I just got a fun phone call.
>
> It was, he said, from Microsoft. They've found a virus on my computer!
>
> "Oh no," I said.
>
> "Yes," he said.
>
> He then offered me a free thing for getting rid of it, which I gratefully
> accepted.
>
> He talked me through starting up my computer, running Internet Explorer,
> going to his web site, clicking on a link to download his software, and
> then running his software, all of which I did eagerly, while finding ways
> to get him to tell me what I ought to be seeing, so that I could tell him
> that's what I was indeed seeing.
>
> Then he asked me for the code number that came up, and that's where I
> failed. I gave him a seven digit number, as requested, and he said it was
> wrong. So I gave it again. No, it's wrong. At that point, I didn't feel
> that I could plausibly change the number, and anyway, I didn't know how to
> change it to make it right, so I gave it to him a third time.
>
> He regretfully concluded that he wasn't going to be able to help me, and
> we parted good friends.
>
> I'm guessing that the number encoded my IP address. But this seems to me
> to be an apallingly expensive way to plant a bot on spmepne's computer.
> What happened to good old-fashioned spam?
>
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-- 
"Fergie", a.k.a. Paul Ferguson
 Engineering Architecture for the Internet
 fergdawgster(at)gmail.com
 ferg's tech blog: http://fergdawg.blogspot.com/

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