[SWLUG] Scam phone calls

[Colin Law]

On 25 April 2012 01:28, Neil Jones <neil at nwjones.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> This one will amuse you, I hope.
> I as at my parents' place recently. My father has a windows machine
> which I help him with occasionally. He has a phone extension next to it.
> I was sitting there actually preparing to run a virus scan on the
> machine when the phone rang. I didn't answer of course as it would be
> for my parents who were downstairs.
>
> A matter of seconds later my mother shouts up to me "Pick up the phone".
> This wouldn't be that unusual. Someone from the family , a friend
> perhaps? But no it wasn't. It was someone with an Indian accent spouting
> technobabble about malware.
> Of course I immediately knew what it was. Some scammer trying to get
> access to my father's computer. I took over the conversation. I asked a
> few questions, which he actually had difficulty answering,  He wanted me
> to alter the Windows registry. At which point I confronted him. saying
> loudly. that I was an expert on computers and knew what he was doing and
> that he was a nasty, cheating scammer.

If you have a few minutes to spare, and are on a Linux machine, it is
amusing to just play the dumb PC user and follow his instructions.  He
will get you to try all sorts of things which don't work of course.
Eventually he may twig what is going on, or if you get bored you can
ask if it makes a difference that you are using Ubuntu, at which point
he will hang up.

The most important thing of course is to warn all your friends and
relations who may not be computer savvy about the scam.

Colin