Scam and Hoax calls.
March 10th, 2020 Posted by Damian General, Security 0 thoughts on “Scam and Hoax calls.”
I thought I would broach the subject of scam calls again this month.
They are still around and seem to be on the increase again.
There are two mains attacks to be aware of at the moment, as follows.
Amazon
Firstly, and the most common is a scam where the caller pretends to be from Amazon and is calling about your Amazon Prime account. They claim that your payments have lapsed, and your account will be suspended.
Quite often it is a recorded message or computerised voice that you hear. This should be obvious that it is a scam.
Then they try to take payment from you to ‘reactivate’ the account. It is, of course, bogus and under no circumstances should you give them any payment information.
If you do, the scammers will try and take as much as they can from you. One customer of mine was recently a victim and the scammers tried to take nearly £20,000. Luckily, the customer’s bank stopped the transaction as they suspected it was fraudulent.
ISP
The other scam calls still doing the rounds are callers pretending to be from your Internet Service Provider, or I.S.P. for short.
They claim to be from B.T., Virgin or whoever your ISP may be. The premise is that they have detected a problem with your service and need access to your computer to ‘fix’ it for you. This is untrue in every case and under no circumstances should you let them have access to your computer.
Once they gain access you have no control of what they do and see. They can then install anything, including malware, key logging software or set up the remote access so they can continue to get access in the future without your knowledge.
Computer message
Another variation on this scam is one that starts on your computer. A message may pop up on your screen saying you have a problem and to call a particular number in order to ‘fix’ it.
This again is a scam, and you should not ever call the number displayed. They will, again, try to persuade you to grant them access to your computer. Usually these messages pop up as a result of a compromised advert on a webpage.
As ever if you have been affected by any of the above scams then please get in touch for assistance and advice as to what to do next.
Thank you for reading,
Damian
