I\'m calling from Microsoft and we\'ve noticed a problem...

[Ghostcrawler]

SCAM SCAM SCAM... :rant

My mother still has her home phone and every 3 months or so she'll get a series of these calls back to back for a week straight.. For a time she took to straight up CUSSING these folks from India out, and when that didn't work she started asking for numbers for "her son in IT" to call them back at, at which point they started hanging up on her. This was after I had to explain to her that Microsoft doesn't CALL FOLKS about computer issues. What a battle with her that was, Microsoft all calling officially and junk vs. my reasoned explanations.

So just this week my Mother in law, retired in Florida, with my wife's youngest son living with grandma cos she'll baby him where we won't, has the kid (21 year old man child) call us up about Grandma's broken computer.. he wants me to diagnose and fix the issue from a state away. After some hemming and hawing about we finally get the story out of him.. Microsoft called Grandma up and their "representative" told her her issue was DIRE and so she sat down at her computer, and relayed to him her IP address and entered in the commands to give some stranger access to her computer. Now it's borked and she's getting several calls a day wanting $$$ to fix it.

:BH :BH :BH :BH :BH :BH :BH :BH :BH :BH :BH :BH

There's a reason that I sometimes participate in a forum appropriately called "NO, I will not fix your F#&*ING Computer!".

 

[stradial]

I posted this a while back.

I received a call from a woman, who could barely speak English, claiming to be from Microsoft headquarters.
She said my computer was giving them error messages and needed me to press the Microsoft key and the R key at the same time, then tell her what info showed up.

After screwing with her for 5 minutes, I told her I had done what she asked.
(I wasn't even near my computer at the time)
She asked what was said in the box that appeared.
I told her, running my words together, it said; "**** You."
After her asking me to repeat that 4 times and me doing so, again running my words together, she asked me to say it slowly, so I did.
She got mad and told me to do something I would never do and hung up.


(I know I was bad for using that word, but hey, she was trying to steal from me)

 

[mei lan]

Unfortunately, this is a natural consequence of having so much information freely available. ** I AM ALL FOR HAVING SAID INFORMATION FREELY AVAILABLE. ** I just think it would behoove people to not believe Every. Single. Thing. they hear.

If it sounds too good to be true, IT IS!!!

 

[deewee]

My boss got one of those calls at home. Thankfully she asked me before they did anything.