That's not fair on everybody

For those people who are tech savvy then yes it's an idiot tax but for my 75 yr old mother in-law who received one of these calls it is not.

The fact is that to non-technical people they sound *very* convincing (we had one on speaker phone a while ago and toyed with them). Using subtle and not so subtle scare tactics she was enticed into trying to visit a website which would have installed remote control software.

Thankfully her BT line was faulty that day and she was unable to get onto the site but they did say they'd call again in a few days. When she put the phone down it dawned on her that she should have hung up earlier and she called her daughter (my wife) in floods of tears fearing her email / bank details etc had all been pilfered. I duly checked the machine and confirmed all ok.

Amazingly they did call back and try again and she told them where to stick it.

Fail icon is for you sir.

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You let your 75 year old Mother-in-law use Windows?

The fail is all yours, sir.

Windows is easiest to "support"

The rest of the family also help her out and they're all used to using windows - giving her Linux would not have been an option neither would buying a mac (too expensive)

So is it a scam?

What purports to be Microsoft's own tech support website showed something like this - before I could get any actual support I had to pay some (too many) dollars to sonebody. Perhaps it too was a fake

Actually...

The best thing to do is keep them on the phone. I always keep them on the phone for a good 20 minutes or so and if everyone else did them same they'd go bust in no time. It also gets you put on a blacklist so you don't get the calls anymore, my phone has been silent for almost a year.

Regards the calls, they are quite tricky. I had one confused when I said my event log had no errors or warnings in it and he kept asking me what I was looking at to check I was at a computer. I wasn't but he never worked that out.

Anywho, take 20 minutes out of your life and keep them on the phone, it's the only way to stop them.

Keep them on the phone

I have a cordless phone, so putting it down doesn't cut the connection. Putting it down next to a loudspeaker-load of 20th century "musique concrète" (classical music with no recognisable tune and not too easy on the ears) and leaving it for half an hour somehow gives scam-callers the right idea. Or put the phone down next to some noisy machinery. And go into another room for a while.

Not the point

yes, the *calls* are cheap. But the *time* of the droid trying to fleece you isn't.

If it took them 5,000 hours of people-time to make $1 instead of 5 minutes, then the whole scam would simply evaporate.

Re: Actually

Indeed, keep them on the phone, and if you've a while spare then there's childish fun to be had too:

After 'failing' to get their LogMeInRescue (which gives permits administrative tasks as well as remote desktop control), they gave up and switched to ShowMyPC instead. This uses VNC over SSH and is therefore relatively safe, and also lets you restrict the connection to one specific windows.

Suggestions for this include restricting them to an instance of MS Paint showing a screenshot of a Windows desktop, or to VLC playing something appropriate. I'm sure more creative types could come up with some far superior ideas.

Maybe

A CIA desktop ....

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One hour.

Is that a record?

"Are you seeing a Windows logo on the bottom left hand corner of your screen, sir?"

"No. I can't see anything like that."

"What are you seeing?"

"I can see an orange circle."

"Please be clicking on the orange circle, sir. You will be seeing a list of applications which is including 'my computer'".

"No. The list is [reads list]"

"That is being very strange sir. I'll will be asking my supervisor for help. Please be holding."

Etc. These morons, including the "MSCE", never once twigged that I was using Linux. Eventually I got bored and told them where to shove it.

Keeping them on the phone doesn't work

I was working at my mothers' farm one day when one of these regular callers rang and as I was working on something fairly undemanding, decided to spin them out and see what they did.

Their spiel is scarily convincing for anyone non-technical - they wallk people through a number of commands including showing actual error events in the event viewer that don't take much spin to sound scary.

I stopped it short of clicking on the web page link that was their GotoMyPC, and was doing that in a more secure environment than a PC browser.

Wasting their time for over an hour and telling them I just wanted to see their URL so I could report them didn't do anything to prevent the sods from continuing to call her.

Mentioning the word criminal fraud does make them hang up very quickly though ;-)

This is in the South-west of Western Australia and I suspect they are targeting a lot of the older residents in that area.

Brilliant stuff!

"In the end he got really quite abusive and told me i was a bad computer engineer if i thought i wasn't infected and therefore needed help."

Superb, made my lunchtime just a bit brighter!

I think my reply would have been, "I'm not earning £2/hour cold-calling people to scam money from them, not a penny of which I will get instead going into the back account of some other rich bastard, and I need help?!"

Time is money

If you take a scammer all the way through his spiel before you let him know you're wise to him, then you have reduced the number of people who can be scammed by one. For the expense of 10 or 15 minutes of your time, you have caused the scammer to lose anywhere from the £50 "premium service" scam fee up to the thousands that can be pillaged from someone's bank account. If all of us reading did it just three or four times, they would lose millions.

So yes, I do consider wasting their time to be a profitable use of mine.

Possible answers

1. They might have access to leaked phone number lists, or they may have a copy of a Directory Enquiries CD set from BT, or they might just make them up!

2. They probably don't. It's just a line dangled to make them appear more plausible. Alternatively, they may have some leaked information from BT or your ISP, because it is certain that at a known time, those organisations know which IP address is allocated equipment on which phone line.

3. Windows is ubiquitous. For home systems, chances are that at least 90% of homes with a computer have a Windows variant rather than a Mac, Linux or other system. And even those with Linux probably have Windows installed somewhere as a dual boot.. The Reg. readership are not typical. My house as all three (Win2000, WinXP, and Win7, OSX, and Linux), as well as an AIX box.

I suppose that there will be an increasing number of houses that have broadband for just their TV, gaming console, iPad or Android Pad. I wonder how the ISP's will cope with supporting such customers? At the moment they all appear to be geared around having a Windows box around.

An alternative game

Act as if you're the callee on a phone sex chat line. They generally hang up when you ask for their credit card no before you'll finish them off.

This title contains only letters...

I like the line "is your mother proud of what you do for a living?". Thanks; I shall add it to my normal response, which is to say, "What you are doing is scamming; are you proud of the fact that you cheat widows and orphans out of their hard-earned cash?" and slam down the phone.

While I would like to spin them out for a while, my time is too precious to waste with these tossers.