Live Audio Recording Of A Typical Phishing Call “Selling” Windows Security Services

To you, this might sound like an obvious phishing scam. Turns out the perpetrators are trying to gain access to your computer to remove a virus they claim you have. The fee for this service is a mere $250 (or more, if you go for the upsell) conveniently added to your major credit card.

Listen to the Actual Audio:

Transcript: [Your computer has been] breached. Please call windows security department as soon as possible on toll free 1-866-833-0231 – otherwise your Microsoft windows services will be stopped and you will not [be] able to use your computer. Please call “urgent” at windows security department on toll free 1-866-833-0231.

Common sense says that Microsoft is NOT going to call and tell you your computer is infected. Never have and never will.

BUT – everybody knows somebody that panics – and becomes victimized by this type of scam. Even worse, once the bad guys have access to your machine, it’s a trivial step for them to compromise your online banking and credit card payment information using a simple key-logger.

In these cases, the only way to restore order to your computer is to re-format the drive and restore from an image backup you previously created. (Dr.Backup offers a weekly full image backup service to our business clients for a nominal fee.)

If you do NOT have an image backup, you will be forced to reinstall the operating system, re-establish all user accounts, reinstall all application software and then recover your data from an online/cloud backup service. (You do back up your data using a reliable online backup service, right?)

Alas, bad things happen to good people … all the time.