Anonymous
No,
I got that three times last week the guy said I had a computer virus and claimed he's from Microsoft BTW I have Linux and FreeBSD.
Tips
1) It's a guy with a thick foreign accent sounds like a Paki or Indian but not always it can be an American too
2) There's crackling in the background
3) The number calling is either long distance or it's some bogus 1-800 number
4) In the phone conversation he asks what time zone your in meaning he doesn't where in the world you are he's calling numbers randomly
5) He tries to convince you to let him remotely connect to your PC
Just hang up.
?
Microsoft will never call you for a virus but if there is a common virus affecting all people Microsoft will simply make a windows update to help fix that issue not call all of you one by one
Anonymous
Of course he's not.
I'm pretty switched on with computers and these sort of scams, and, that said, I almost fell for it.
Would you believe, at this point my daughter in law arrived and realised what was going on. She frantically motioned for me to give her the phone so I acted all 'old guy' and suggested they speak to her. She was great!
She went all girlie on them and said her dad was useless with these things - how could she help. Acting dumb, pretending not to understand, and, screwing up his instructions she ran the guy in circles for nearly 15 mins.
In the end she got serious asked a few more questions and then said - 'you're not going to try and get me to pay £29 (or whatever), because someone rang me yesterday with exactly the same scam' .
He was not a happy bunny!
chrisjbsc
No. Why would Microsoft call you? There are around 700 million PC's using Microsoft software. MS can NOT call all of those...
Anonymous
NO!!! No legitimate company would EVER collect personal details from your machine even if they detected it was infected as that would be totally illegal. So this is NOT from Microsoft. NEVER follow links sent by emails like this, hang up the phone if they call. Otherwise they will infect your machine with spyware and then charge you for "fixing" it.