The uncertainty of cold calls
If you received a call out of the blue telling you that you had won a prize in a lottery, would you think it was your lucky day, or would alarm bells start ringing?
Gail Davis of Orpington, Kent, recently received a call from a man claiming to be from Apple and saying that she had won a prize of $10,000 because she was the person who had downloaded the ten billionth application from Apple's AppStore. Deciding it was a prank call, she promptly hung up. I expect I would have done the same. Certainly this has all the characteristics of the "419" or "Nigerian" scam.
In this case though, it really was an executive from Apple on the phone and it was her daughter who had recently downloaded the Paper Glider app which had clocked up the ten billionth application download. Eventually the confusion was resolved and she received her prize, although disappointingly it wasn't cash, but a voucher allowing her to spend up to $10,000 in Apple's iTunes store.
So if people are suspicious of good news calls, are they equally suspicious of bad news calls? Apparently not.
Oxfordshire Trading Standards officers are warning people to be alert to a Windows scam conducted by cold callers, and are aware of at least 23 cases to date. The con-men, sometimes claiming they work for Microsoft, say they are calling because they have detected a virus on the householder's computer and suggest it is at serious risk from "infected malware". To add plausibility to the claim, they direct the victim to Windows Event Viewer, the program which logs Windows event and boot-up messages and which no-one ever looks at or understands. This log almost always contains boot messages misleadingly flagged "critical" even on completely healthy machines. The con-men will, of course, suggest this is proof that the machine is badly infected and urgently needs to be decontaminated.
If the computer owner has been taken in by this nonsense, (and sadly most of us would be), then the scammer will helpfully offer to fix it for them. The "fix" is achieved by instructing the victim to download and run a rogue program from a website which will do everything you would expect of malware, including rummaging through all the files on the disc looking for credit card numbers, passwords, and other information useful for identity theft, as well as giving complete control of the PC to the remote scammer.
Now, to add insult to injury, when the scammer has finished his search of the computer, he pronounces the machine cured and then demands payment for service. Some will no doubt pay because they are embarrassed to have thought he was doing it out of the kindness of his heart and don't wish to appear foolish. Victims of this scam have even been asked to sign up to a direct debit to provide "ongoing protection". Trading Standards says it knows of one case where the householder was told they needed to pay £240 as a one-off payment. People who objected to paying were threatened with having their computer crashed and their disk wiped if they did not comply.
If you, or members of your family, get calls like this, make a note of any names or website addresses they give you, hang up, and report the matter to your local Trading Standards office. If strangers call to give helpful technical advice over the phone, be suspicious.
28th January 2011
This article comes from the SKILLZONE email newsletter, published monthly since January 2008, and covering topics related to technology and the internet. All articles and artwork in the SKILLZONE newsletter are orignal content.