Wow, I can 't believe I just got one of those phishing phone calls where they try to get you to ...

[G+_Jeff Wheatley]

Wow, I can't believe I just got one of those phishing phone calls where they try to get you to give them remote access to your computer! His accent sounded like it was from India, and he claimed to be a MS systems engineer based in Orlando Florida. He asked me if I had a Windows computer, and had me go to teamviewer.com to download the client. While it was downloading he started saying things like "does your computer normally take this long to download from the internet?" and "have you had any programs stop working or crash recently?"

I've heard about this on multiple tech podcasts, so I was going to follow their directions using a VM (I heard that some guy made a youtube video of himself doing just that) but I finally got tired of it and just told the guy I was wise to his scam and that he should get a new job, and then hung up on him.

What worries me is that I have older relatives that would possibly get sucked into this kind of thing.

Freakin scum!

As we all know... the weakest link in computer security is the user.

[G+_Jonathan Rose]

My parents once got a call from someone claiming to be from Microsoft. They said that their computer is sending Microsoft errors and that they need to download something to let them control the computer to remove the error. Funny thing is that my parents have a Mac so they realized it was a scam right away.

[G+_Margaret Richardson]

Friend got a call from google tech support. Telling her that they notice an issue with her email account and was she in front of her pc. Well she doesn't have gmail so she hung up.

[G+_John short (shorty)]

Guy said his name was peter, I gave him a big hello and that I missed him.  That brought a little silence,  I asked what country he was calling from.  He said the united states so I asked which province in the united states.  more silence then he hung up on me : ) 

[G+_Chris Quinn]

This would happen a lot to the customer's at my last job. Where I cleaned up computers. Then they would call us and we would clean all the viruses that were downloaded to their pc and told them to change their passwords to everything. Most of them were elderly people and didn't realize that Microsoft would never call them out of the blue to connect to their pc.

[G+_Harold Crews]

I've had one of these calls. It must have been about a year ago. I told him he would have to call someone more stupid and gullible than I am. People who don't know any better than to believe these scammers need to be on a Chromebook. They're great for what they are.

[G+_Jerry Ham]

What we need is an Eliza bot / Chat bot specifically tuned to handle these calls and, as you said, a VM that it can let the caller play with. It would be neat to see the transcripts something like that would generate.

[G+_bryant thompson]

I get a call from Habib from 'Microtechsoft' support, I not longer have the tape machine connected to my phone line but I've talked to Habib a number of times and I tell him I have a kindle and an iPad.

[G+_Colin Willson]

I get these calls almost every day, I also have a neighbor who fell for it, installed ransom-ware and payed another $200 or something to "fix" their computer. Obviously the malware was still on the computer after that until a re-install.