Beat the Odds, Stay Away from Scammers
If you are reading this article and your last name starts with the letter C then please send me $1000! According to statistical information, this should be around 7.5 % of the population and given The Morning Bulletin’s circulation of 20,000 people – this should net me around $1.5 million (not bad for the mornings work)!
These are the same sorts of odds and returns that phone scammers are playing for. This is why we are all getting phone calls that are supposedly from Telstra or BigPond or Microsoft telling us that they can see that our computers have viruses and that we HAVE to let them fix it! We have struck more new customers during the week that were suckered into this scam and in most cases they are losing between $300 to $1200 dollars – in some cases they are having their credit cards maxed out.
These phone scammers are getting increasingly more plausible and also far more desperate – whereby they simply will not take NO for an answer. A new customer that came in on Tuesday had already fallen victim to one of these scams. He had become suspicious during the course of the phone call but had already given the caller access to his computer. The caller had been able to show him an area of the computer that displayed some errors (the event logs will nearly always show some errors).
The caller then became increasingly insistent that these errors HAD to be fixed and that he needed credit card details to finish the work. Again it is the more trusting of the population that often gets caught – or the ones that hate to hang up on someone. Just remember that in some cases that we have seen – once they are given access they will even destroy your data if they don’t get their way.
Also along the same theme beware of emails which are also doing the rounds asking you to log into your bank to help them complete a security upgrade. Some of these will have your bank’s authentic logo and once again they will suggest that if you don’t comply by a certain date then your Internet banking feature will be suspended – no real bank will ever ask you to do this.
The Internet is an incredibly useful medium but it has introduced a range of scams, Charlatan’s and pitfalls that never existed. What’s worse is that many of these people can do this behaviour from the comfort of their own house and they are often in a country where their law enforcement agencies couldn’t care less.
Future Byte Me topics can be emailed to [email protected] and Bruce is contactable at Kerr Solutions, 205 Musgrave Street or on 49 222 400.
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