ItsGeekToMe.co

Welcome my fellow Geeks, to the grand spectacular 200^th issue of It’s Geek to Me!  (Insert appropriate confetti toss/champagne toast at your own discretion.)  Yes, the party attitude was certainly in the air at Geek Central this week.  We look forward from here to the column’s 4^th anniversary in late July.  I.G.T.M. first published on July 26, 2007, so the anniversary issue is #209, scheduled to publish on July 24^th.  If you need a mailing address to send-in those gifts, cards and miscellaneous accolades, please send me an e-mail.  Meanwhile, let’s get to business!

Q: I just received a strange phone call from a woman with a foreign accent who described how 98% of people using the Windows operating system are having their computers crash because of something to do with the phone system.  (Didn’t quite understand that connection.)  She then instructed me to turn on my computer and she would guide me through the steps to eliminate this problem.  At that point, I became suspicious and told her because I had a firewall plus utilized a cable connection with a firewall, I was not interested and hung up.  It was an out of area call so no return number on my caller ID.  Thought I’d let you know in case it is a scam. 

– Howard H.
Niceville, Fla

A: I can confirm with absolute certainty that this is a scam, Howard, and I thank-you for helping me bring this to my readers’ attention.  Most of these phone calls seem to originate from India, which would explain the accent.  If you had gone a little further with the caller, she would have had you bring up your Windows Event Viewer to “prove” to you that your system is having issues.  In the Event Log you would have seen what look like multiple problems, because Windows logs everything that happens in the Event Log, and marks many of them as “warning” or “error” even though they are really just events that have very little effect on the operation of your computer.  They happen all the time, and you never even notice them.  However, having “proven” to you that your system is infested with problems (which, of course, can only be caused by the malware that this good Samaritan called to warn you about) she would then have offered to sell you a protection solution at the cost of an annual fee, and which would have required her to remotely load software onto your machine.  Heaven only knows what that software is, but it could be anything from a spam-generator, to spyware that steals bank accounts and passwords, to a remote-control app that zombifies your computer, allowing it to be used in conjunction with other infected PCs to perform large-scale denial-of-service attacks.  Not outraged yet?  Think about this:  The people who fall for this scam are actually paying the criminal to infect their computer!  And don’t think people don’t fall for it, because it they didn’t, the scammers would have moved on to more fertile ground by now.

Be careful out there, Geeks!  Nobody – and I mean nobody – should be calling you up out of the blue and asking for remote access to your computer, no matter how legitimate it sounds.  If you get tempted by such an offer, before you act on it, do what Howard did: ask me.  I’m here to help!