Posted on 08/03/2014 8:00:43 PM PDT by nickcarraway
a South San Francisco resident received a phone call from a man fraudulently posing as a Microsoft Windows employee and asking for personal information on Wednesday, according to police.
The suspect, calling himself Mike Johnson, told the resident that her computer had been compromised by a hacker and that he needed access to her computer to conduct a diagnosis.
The victim did not provide any personal information to the suspect, according to police.
Microsoft said that they do not contact their customers over the phone, nor do they have any records of anyone from the company calling the victim.
The number on the victim's caller identification was (231) 324-1324, which has since been disconnected, police said.
Anyone with information is encouraged to call South San Francisco police at (650) 877-8900.
SF LSM types are only just now learning about it?
Boilerplate scam. BFD.
I guess NBC Bay Area news needs something to fill the empty slots created by not reporting all the leftist scams, crimes and misc “wrong doings”.
(To the victim): Welcome to the party, pal! This scam has been circulating for at least a couple of years now, and I’ve heard of even earlier instances.
Most people just hang up, because as the article notes, MS will never call you to “fix” your computer (nothing they do is free); it’s a $250 charge just to talk to their support before they even try to fix something.
Some people, particularly those with non-MS operating systems, will play along and let the “caller” enjoy trying to “fix” MacOS or Linux (or occasionally something even more exotic).
And a very few will let the “caller” connect to their Tarbaby computer and turn the tables on the would-be identity thief/hacker.
Yeah, I get that “Windows” call every three or four weeks. They even have my name. I’ve had Apple for the last five years but I figured they got my name from one of the anti virus programs I had downloaded to my late but unlamented Windows machine.
I must have had a dozen or more calls using this scam. Lately I have fun with them. I pretend I’m somebody important and turn the tables on them.
Remember the radio dj scam on the telemarketer saying he was investigating the murder of a flaming homosexual.
I try but I’m not that good.
I received that call two weeks ago. When I told the idiot I have already traced back to his terminal IP address there was a loud noise as he slammed himself off line. Hope he pissed his pants.
Same arsewipe called here last Friday, too! I really pissed him off when I kept saying I couldn’t understand him due to his heavy accent. I even told him to go find an American to translate. He finally got so mad he hung up.
This is a fairly well-known scam.
A good way to counter this scam is to play with their mind and say you have traced their computer and it does not appear to be in a Microsoft office, so you have placed it under remote control to determine if it has an authorized license by Microsoft. And that they should not turn off their computer while this information is being collected or it could damage their operating system and hard drive, leaving it exposed to hackers...
etc. Such individuals can be remarkably gullible.
I ask them what company is called “Windows?” There is no such company. There is a product, but you cannot call from a product, only a company the sells the product.
Is “Mike Johnson” employed by the IRS, NSA, BLM, or political operatives for the Muslim Democrat Brotherhood at the White Hut?
Someone from “BarclayCard MasterCard” tried a credit card scam on me last week. An automated system told me that there had been some suspicious activity on my card. The next prompt asked me to enter my 16-digit credit card number.
Yeah, right.
My wife got the same call a few days later. The system sounded very professional, very like what you might hear when you call an actual credit card company.
I’ve gotten calls like that, too. Didn’t fall for the scam, though. Didn’t think microsoft would be spending their time calling up customers.
I suspect he is probably the cousin of Mike Hunt :-).
Is he related to Michael Huntsaker, of "Lethal Weapon" fame? :)
Things must really be slow in SF.
I receive these calls all the time. My fav response: “I’m a system manager and I’m sitting here looking at 27 servers, all running Apache. Which one did you say was broken?”
Then I lay the phone down and continue w/ my business. When the phone starts beeping, indicating they hung up, I hang up the phone.
I fell for the scam and I now have $4.3 million dollars in my bank account. I’m going to go to the bank tomorrow and clean out my account.
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