Warning - new phone scam. Are you there?

Man - I'll tell you what. If Trump want to address something that affects us all just about every day, MAKE the "Do Not Call" registry actually work. And create a spam email "forwarding" repository with actual people behind it who hack those servers out of existence.

NEW scam. A live or recorded voice will call you and ask if you can hear them. I got it twice so far today, "Hi, it's Rachael. Are you there?" Yours could be "Hi, it's Jim from card services. Can you hear me ok?"
You get the point.

The ploy is that they are recording your voice saying "yes." Now, it is unclear so far if anyone has gotten money out of it for real because it is a new thing. But the basic ploy is to get your recorded voice saying "Yes" and "No" in order to use it to authorize credit card or other purchases. Just hang up. Sometimes I like to string the "live ones" along for as long as possible until their head explodes. But I guess I should stop that because some are now trying to record your words to electronically make sentences with them later on in your voice. No telling where that may come back later yet on this latest crap.

Now sure. Lots of you don't answer unrecognized calls. I get that. And lots of you will just hang up immediately. But if even ONE of these heathens gets foiled because one of you read this, then I sleep better tonight. Let your family or friends know. Especially those who may be older or not so tech savvy. For instance, I have had not one, but 2, "senior" family members who have "let the nice guy from Microsoft in to fix their computer." One lost $85 (cheap) and the other lost everything on their hard drive (priceless photos that weren't backed up anywhere." Some folks will fall for these things even if you are not "that guy." If it didn't work, they wouldn't do it...
And I can tell you that I get spam emails from people on this very forum. You are not sending them, but your email (gmail, yahoo, msn, aol, etc) or your computer itself has been hacked and its being used to send spam or viruses. So it can happen.

Anyway, I saw this "yes / no" recording story on the news this week and kinda blew it off. But since I got the call at least twice today before I blocked the number I thought I'd make a rant about it here in case it helped even one of us out there reading.

- Don

 

So that reminds me of another tip for the "Microsoft Guy." Since I like to waste as much of their time as possible, I have strung a bunch of these along to see what exactly they were going to try to do.

Invariably thus far, what they need to do to actually do some damage is get you to create a Teamviewer connection to them. Teamviewer is a legit program that many of us in support will use to connect to your screen to fix things. But they also use it to get access to your system. They CAN'T do it unless YOU let them.

They will eventually get you to open a browser and will start "spelling" for you: "T like Tom / E like Edward / A like Apple," etc. What they are trying to get you to type is "Teamviewer."

I use a program called "GoToAssist" to fix your computer remotely. But lots of people, including Mark from Rand here, use Teamviewer. So again, it's not to be feared if the person helping you is LEGIT.

But it is worthy to note that this is the primary way I have seen them try to get to my machines over the phone.