Thursday 13 January 2011

Of scams and scammers.

I must admit that if I get a scam call, if I have the time, I will often do what I consider is a civic duty and keep them talking for as long as possible. At least they will not be calling my Mum or indeed any other person who gets easily confused when it comes to technical matters (viruses on PCs), fitted kitchens, changing electricity supplier etc...

The other day, at the end of a long day I got a cold call....

With low cost phone calling cold calls have escalated.
I’ve kept a transcript of the call and thought it would be nice to translate the scam claims into non technical terms.

"Hello Mr Beetmain" (sic), we are monitoring your PC have received an alarm. Yes?

Translation: We have got your name from a telephone book and if you haven’t got a computer you are going to tell me now. If you haven’t, this call is going to be short.

We are monitoring computers in the Henley on Thames area.

Translation: We are on the Henley page of the telephone book.

Your PC has been running slow and our technicians can help you.

Translation: At some time your computer has run slowly and I’m prompting you to remember. I'm not going to talk about price because later we are going to stiff you for all we can get.

Your computer is infected with viruses Yes?

Translation: There is no way I can tell that your computer is infected. I can’t connect to it (yet). However, the odds are that you don’t know this, nor do you know how to tell if your computer is infected either. You probably dont understnd that the most popular forms of antivirus software start running by themesleves and can slow your computer down when they are giving your computer a full check up. There is no way I’m going to tell you helpful things like that.

We know that in the area of Henley on Thames there are "huge amount of infections"

Translation: It’s a racing certainty that there are some computers in Henley that have viruses; I’m going to try to scare you now. By the same logic: if you live in Henley, its very probable that you have walked down Henley High Street.

I decided to string this guy along. My good deed for the day: whist he was talking to me he was not calling some poor sole who would be taken in by his alarmist spiel.

"Your ip address is blinking in red."

Translation: The sky is blue, the sun is bright, and my front door is white, but red sounds more dangerous.

So I asked: where is it blinking in red?

"On the main server"

Translation: This sap I’m talking to has to know there are computers called servers. Techies often refer to “the main server” in films and on TV. In the same vein Scotty says to Captain Kirk, “The Dylithium crystals are exhausted, she cannie take it any more Captain.” Don’t know what this means but it sure sounds good and helps the action along.

“What main server?”

No answer....

Translation: This must be a different episode of Star Trek. Thinks... back to script. To be honest I did not actually hear him turning the pages, but there was a long pause and a change of gears.

"We are the people who look after all the computers in USA and Canada and UK"

Translation: Need to say something sounding authorative here to regain control. There must be some organisation that controls computers (mustn't there?) so he might as well claim to be a member of it.

"We are authorised multinational company"

Translation: The boss told him (authorised) him to do the scam and is boss is one nationality and he is another.

"These infections the red errors are boneaires, yellow warnings are virus infections"

Translation: Oh well try as I might there is no such word "boneaires" he spelt it out. It is in the same category as "contrafibularities" from Black Adder 3 - simply made up to annoy Dr Samuel Johnson when he delivered his first dictionary to the Prince Regent.

Are you in front of your computer?

Translation: Are you in front of your computer?

You need to restart your computer: go to the windows button and press restart.

Translation: You don’t need to restart you computer, but if you do, from what you tell me, I’ll determine if the computer is a Mac or a PC and you are gullible enough to do this you’ll probably do silly things I ask later.

I was guided to a thing called the application log: this is (if you don't know) a diary that the computer keeps. If there is a real problem, then a well written program will report issues either back to the developers, record them in the transaction log, or both. On the other had Viruses work by stealth and will not usually lead to recording anything in this log if they can avoid it.

"Yellow warning are viruses" in the transaction log.

Translation: Yellow traffic lights mean you are going to crash into a house by the side of the road.

"Don't click on any of the information entries: it will cause your machine to crash"

Translation: Don’t click on any of the information entries, you might get a message which show I’m talking utter rubbish.

Tell me what CPU usage is reading over the next 30 seconds: what was the last reading? That's the important one.

Translation: This sounds quite knowledgeable. If I was really trying to help, we would look on the next tab to find which programs (possibly your antivirus) were using the CPU. Thank goodness I didn’t slip up and say “CP three 0” out of Star Wars instead of CPU like I did last week.

We are "ClickToFix"

Translation: We might be “ClickToFix”. Whoever we are, we are certainly trying to scare you into some outrageous support charges for support you almost certainly don’t need.

They gave their phone number as 02088199744

Translation: more here

Happy New Year