My wife got a call this evening on our phone from someone claiming to be from "Windows Technical Department" saying that my Windows computer had a virus.  Knowing that this was some sort of scam, Nicole says let me give you to my husband so he can work with you.  ;)  Oh, goodie.  I get to have fun with the guy.  We exchange pleasantries over the phone and trying to be as pleasant and chipper as I could be.  The poor sap does not know about what is going to hit him...

Me - "I will be happy to work with you to solve our virus problem."

Him - "Go ahead and turn on your computer."  Okay....my first problem.  He wants me to turn on my computer...I have 3 of them on in a 5 ft reach...all of them on.  :)

"Okay - Turned on."  I wonder if the 5 seconds it took me to "turn on my computer" was enough time.  "My Ubuntu Linux box is turned on."

"Look at your keyboard.  Do you see the 'C-T-R-L' key on the lower left of your keyboard?"

"I see the control key.'

"Do you see the key that looks like the Windows logo?"

"No, I see the Option key on my Apple keyboard."

"Uh...are you in front of your Windows computer?"

At that point I had enough.  I told him to stop trying to scam me ("this is not a scam", "Let me get one of my Microsoft certified people."...give me their numbers and I will check them out).  I told them if they Google their own company, there are many links that say they are a scam.  Protest after protest until I was done with the call.  The number of the caller ID shows up as 987654321 (spoofed caller ID).  

I really have to get up a VM quicker next time so I can try to see what they want me to do and better understand the scam.  They will call back (obviously) because they called here 2 weeks ago from 0256592258.

 

Microsoft has even put up their own site to avoid these kind of phone scams.  The US site on this can be found here.