Crazy! The quoted part below is from someone's post on TiVocommunity. Someone else commented Another person posted that this was similar to When Antivirus Scammers Call the Wrong Guy - Slashdot. There's a great video there of what the scammer did. For those who are tech savvy, you'll enjoy it... I think.
We've been getting these calls in Australia for about the past year. They tell me that there's a problem with "the computer in the house". When I ask them which one - there are five - they tell me it's "the Windows computer". A couple of times, when I haven't been too busy, I've gone along with them, about as far as the person in your first post did. Except I just pretended to follow their prompts - I didn't even have the computer switched on. At some point, I'd shout "AAAAAAAGGGH! ALL MY FILES ARE BEING DELETED! DID YOU DO THIS?" and they'd hang up. Otherwise, I tend to put on my breathy voice and tell them they sound hot. Especially the men (I am a man). Usually, by the time I've got to the stage of asking them about their underwear, they hang up. But I am intrigued as to what the end game is. I've always assumed it's something more than selling me an "anti-virus upgrade package" - I thought they'd try to get me to install some sort of back door to my computer.
I've never gotten one of these calls but it would be funny if I had a VM ready like the guy featured in the Slashdot article.
They are active in Italy, too. We (our family) don't own a Microsoft PC, it happens to be an Apple household. There are Microsoft PC's at work though. When they called at home on Monday and asked for the >Windows computer< I first thought some guy in company IT had mixed up work and home phone numbers. As said, there are >Windows computer< at work. Only, the company IT support is based in Germany and the caller had an indian accent. So when I responded "We don't have a Windows computer here " he asked "You don't have a computer?" Me: "Oh yes, we have a computer" Him: "So what computer is it?" Me: "It's a macintosh" Him "Uh? What computer? " Me "Macintosh, Apple" Him: disconnects Should have done what Nate Anderson from ArsTechnica did, but I did't have the presence of mind
