Monday evening I had a phone call from someone claiming to be from Microsoft Technical Support. He said that my Internet connection was showing errors and that they had been following it for a couple of weeks.
That already sounded suspicious. I don’t know if they get that kind of info from our computers or not. Also, I haven’t had any problems.
He told me to go to the computer and he would explain. I said he should call on my other phone line, which is by the computer, but that I was in the midst of dinner, could he call back in half an hour?
I was still suspicious and wasn’t going to actually do anything he told me to, just write down the instructions or ask him to e-mail them. I was then going to ask the technician who set up my computer last year. He never called.
Today I decided to call Microsoft to see if a call like that could be for real. I couldn’t imagine what anyone would have to gain by doing that. The person I spoke with gave me an example of what had happened to someone else with a call like that. She let the person take control of her computer, and apparently a virus or something was installed on it, AND she was charged $139!! He also said that if it had been a legitimate problem, the charge from Microsoft would have been less than that.
Anyway, apparently scams like that are going around, so I thought I’d alert everyone.
