Beware of Scams

Thought we would highlight a new scam that seems to be going around the country at the moment. A few people, have received telephone calls from a supposed company claiming to be accredited to Microsoft. They basically call you up and tell you they are from Microsoft and that they have noticed your computer is running slow. They then start to give you a whole run down of things they think may be happening to your computer (things like: you have a slow Internet connection, your computer is running slower than normal, your computer is sending private information over the Internet, you have a virus etc). They tell you they have detected these things happening and that they are calling to help for you if you could give them your credit card details they would then fix the problems for you for a fee.

Some people believe what these ‘engineers’ are telling them and have not questioned their authenticity. As a result they were then told to download a small program which gave the so called technicians control of their computers and then most found within a very short period of time their computer had been hacked into and details had been stolen, viruses had been activated and some were even locked out of their own systems.

If anyone calls you up and tells you they have found something wrong with your computer, or that they have detected a virus on it, they are lying to you. No-one can diagnose or monitor faults from a remote location (or over the Internet) unless you personally have installed programs onto your system to allow them to do so. At times a qualified technician may offer you remote assistance (which would require you to download and install a small program onto your system – but this would only be at your request.) Please make your friends aware of this scam as many people in our community have already been hit by this and similar things.