I got one of those scam phone calls last night from people claiming to be from an IT company supposedly ‘helping’ people to deal with malware infections on Windows computers. I had a similar call about a week ago but hung up straight away, but last night I decided to play along and see what they were going to get me to do.

The call was obviously from overseas, and the first lady I spoke to guided me through opening up the “Manage Computer” dialog and then through to the Administrative Events view where, shock, horror there were hundreds of error and warning messages. This, I was told was evidence that my computer was badly infected and in need of their assistance. (In reality, there’s a reason why these errors/warnings are hidden away in a view called Administrative Events – and that’s because ordinary users don’t need to worry about them, only system administrators. In my case most of the ‘errors’ aren’t errors at all, but just a consequence of various services not starting when my work laptop is not connected to my work network.)

Anyway, having apparently scared me into have grave doubts about the well being of my computer, the first operator then transferred me to her supervisor. This is such a well-oiled scam, with first line operators weeding out the skeptics and suspicious, before passing on likely prospects to more skilled operators who will talk you through the next phase of the scam, most likely to get you to install software or visit a web-site that will unknown to you, allow the scammer to access your computer, to then trawl for passwords, financial info etc.

Anyway at this point the dinner bell rang so I had to cut my investigation short. I kindly told the ‘supervisor’ that she ought to be ashamed of herself for taking part in a dodgy scheme that is tricking people and taking advantage of them. I said I would pray for her (which I did later), and then hung up.

So, anyone reading this, if anyone rings you up wanting to ‘assist’ you with fixing problems on your computer – just hang up, and don’t forget to pray for these people.

[This content was originally posted to Google+]