A customer of mine fell pray to a phone call from someone claiming to be “Microsoft”. The guy said that there was a number of programs not running on his computer and that he would have to remote in to fix it and, oh by the way, it will cost $200 bucks. The guy remoted in and showed my customers a list of services that are not running, which is totally normal in Windows and charged my customer the $200 to supposedly fix it. 

Days later, My customer did get help from Microsoft and they called the number associated with the charge on his credit card. The guy on the phone said they didn’t know anything about it??? But would refund the charge within 24 hours. My customer cancelled the credit card anyway. The “real” Microsoft guy helped my customer scan his computer for Malware and only found some Adware and tracking cookies. So, we believe the scam was really just the money and not any siginficant Malware placed on his computer. 

Bottome line: Microsoft, Dell or whoever are not monitoring your computer for errors or programs and services running and they will never call you claiming such. I wish my customer would have called me first so he could have skipped this hassle, but he is safe now and that’s the most important thing. 

Safe computing,

Joe