You've got a problem

Most of you must have had at least one call from a friendly person calling from "Microsoft Security Service" to announce that your Windows computer has been sending them error messages. Ron had a call last week. Since we've had several over the past few months, and I've tried a different tack each time, he decided to be clever.

Fifteen minutes later, he was off the phone. I asked him what he had said.

"Well," he replied, "Most of the time I had to ask her to repeat what she said, because her accent was so strong I couldn't understand her. Besides that, I played dumb. She wanted me to go to the bottom of the computer and look for a button. I told her the computer was on the floor, and he couldn't get under it to find any button. Then I put her on hold to listen to the music on the computer. She's probably still listening."

I laughed. I had used the "on hold" trick too. Just put the receiver down beside the speaker and walk away. Twenty minutes later, hang up.

But I was curious. Why would someone repeatedly phone you to tell you your computer had a virus but they could fix it. What was the payoff for them? I decided to play along and see what the scam really was. I had my chance a few days ago.

It was "James" from Microsoft. Apparently an online hacker had managed to get on to my computer and had damaged it. I let him walk me through the steps, including finding that elusive button - the Start button in the lower left of the screen. He guided me through a series of folders until I came to a long list of error and warning messages.

"What do you think that is?" James asked.

"I suppose it's perfectly normal," I replied.

"No, that's the hacker. See how he has damaged your machine. How many errors are there? Can you count them for me?"

"There is a total count at the top - 6,761 errors."

"6,671 errors. Is that correct, ma'am?"

It wasn't but who cares.

Anyway, the upshot was, a technician would connect to my computer, fix the problem for me for one flat rate, then I would be covered for one year, and could contact them to fix my computer whenever the errors reappeared, at no additional charge.

"So how much is this going to cost?" I asked.

"We won't know for sure until the technician sees how much damage was done. It will be between 80 and 150 dollars. That's eight zero dollars to one five zero dollars." American dollars? Canadian dollars? Australian dollars? Did he know where I lived?

Okay, how will the technician fix my computer?"

"If you agree, he will connect to your computer."

"How?"

"Go to Internet Explorer. What do you see there? Amazon?  Google?"

"Live 65. It's a music station."

"You listen to music on your computer? Okay, open a new tab. Now in the white space at the top, type www . showmypc . com."

This is where I got uncomfortable. I wasn't connecting to any website with a name like that. I would investigate later.

"I need to put you on hold," I told James, and put the receiver down beside the speaker, then cranked up the volume.

A little later, Ron came in and I told him about James. We both had a good laugh, and after half an hour had passed I hung up the phone. Five minutes later, it rang and Ron answered.

"It's him," Ron said, and handed me the receiver. Sure enough, it was James. I brushed him off by telling him that my brother was a computer genius and he had removed the error messages. James quickly hung up.

I did some research and found that I was right. The error messages on the computer were a standard logging procedure and were not harmful. ShowMyPC is a legitimate site that allows people to connect remotely to computers for various reasons. If I had gone there, the next step would have been for me to set up a logon with the name and password provided by James. Then he and his henchmen would have had access to my computer and all my history, including logins, passwords, and personal information. They would even have known about this blog.

I guess the payoff for the scammers is two-fold. They get the money from you for "fixing" your computer, plus whatever additional funds they can steal from your bank or credit cards once they have control.

It seems there is no way to report these idiots. They use many different telephone numbers so they are untraceable, and they pop up everywhere. When one ring is shut down, ten others appear to take its place.  The best advice I found from ShowMyPC here and from Microsoft here was to hang up immediately.