Many thanks to John from Breeze PC who got in touch with VB today with some worrying news of a phone-based virus scam.
John told us that he’s been hearing more over the last three weeks of a telephone scam hitting Island residents.
It’s an old scam, but Island residents seem to be the current target for the scammers.
He told us how it works,
Someone phones up a home and says they are phoning from Microsoft and think they have a problem with their computer or their antivirus. They may say that they think the free AVG antivirus or similar they are using is not good enough.
They will then offer to log on and fix the problems on the computer and take a card payment of anything from £80-200 to ‘fix’ any problems.
They seem to be using scare tactics to trick people in to letting them log on to their computer via remote software and then picking up small details like cookies or some spyware and presenting them as ‘threats’.
Microsoft or any computer company should not phone anyone up out of the blue, if you have a computer issue it would nearly always be you that identifies the problem and contacts your local computer company to fix it.
John said that he’d heard of at least ten cases in the last couple of weeks, so if you get a call put the phone down and don’t even think of handing over your credit card details.
Next get in touch Island’s Trading Standards office on (01983) 823396 or (01983) 823370 to report the scam.
Image: Alan Clark Design
