Yep, any company that leaps straight in with threats like that rather than explaining and trying to quell our distrust of them needs to be treated accordingly.

... and was.

I saw a thread recently ('Support onclick'? - MoneySavingExpert.com Forums) about this sort of thing.

Company was called Support On Click from India. Their phone operators were not keen to give their location and claimed to be UK based.

In a cold call, they would say that there was a problem with your PC (I suppose most homes have one these days) and then talk you through demonstrating the infection and setting up remote access to your PC. And charging monthly too.

One interesting snippet is that when challenged, calls were routed to a senior individual who tended to threaten and swear...

Vitesse, sounds like I had a narrow escape then! :ok:

Surely the correct response when they say that there is a problem with your PC, say to them " Since it's a criminal offence to access a computer without the owners permission how do you know that?" and see what their reaction is. :ok:

GG - I'd gone into 'rabbit in the headlights' mode by that stage (believing they were from Microsoft). How gullible can you (I) get?:uhoh:

I've just reported them to the Fraud Office. No doubt they'll just pop up in another guise shortly, unfortunately. Vitesse's linked thread makes very interesting reading.

I am embarrassed that I even listened to them in the first place. :(

Now you lot are really being troublesome. It's about time you grew up and did the 'needfull'

I dunno, Pprune has at least doubled (4) log4rescue's hits on Google, surely that's a net benefit? On the other hand, their satisfaction rate has dropped from 99% to 96%, which suggests Mr Rivets may have tried them out.

This lot registered to offer smooth assurances regarding their operations.

They took great care to distance themselves from Microsoft and claimed they had a team 'generating' leads.

Given the limited number of ways anyone could generate such leads and phone numbers I'm not having them on the site. Depending your own level of inherent paranoia you will no doubt come up with various routes to gaining such contact numbers.

Regards
Rob

I put on my sleuthing head, and Vitesse has stumbled across the truth: these guys are probably Supportonclick in disguise: semantic analysis suggests the web sites were done by the same person(s), plus more obvious hints through whois & Co. Lots of information out there about the activities of Supportonclick.

I see from Google that they have some more hits - moneysavingexpert.com and digitaltoast.co.uk both report Log4rescue as a scam. Sad for their 800 employees :(

I guess that's what happens when you scam people.

Any one who cold calls your home should be put against a wall and dealt with.
This company deserves nothing but shutting down...
As for the Folder lock issue, at least that has nothing to do with the scam. Log4rescue probably got your phone number in the good old tried and tested method prevalent in India. From a call centre where someone sold on the stuff. :*

From what the OP said, it sounded to me that MS, or someone (unauthorised?) at MS passed on her details.

They probably just use that line to suck you in....They were lucky that this person actually reports faults to Microsoft...They were unlucky that she was intelligent and asked before jumping...Who in Microsoft would you give your home phone number to? I've never had occasion to do that.

I agree with call100 here - I certainly don't think that MS is passing anything on.

It is a high probability that anyone they cold-call has a home PC, and 95% or more of those will be running MS Windows (sorry Mac users) and will have clicked "send" when a program crashes. So even without any intervention by them, there's a very good chance indeed that they will make a plausible connection with the "mark". And if they hit a no-PC or Mac user - well so what?

As I wrote originally, it is entirely feasible that they plant malware to initiate a problem and send an alert back to their server alongside / instead of to the correct MS server - hosts file hijack is easy enough! But that's probably crediting them with too much intelligence. :p

SD

Link

Log4rescue mentioned in the above site. Seems to imply that they are also known as supportonclick, systemrecure and logmein123.com running various scams. :=

Forewarned is forearmed :ok:

Logmein123 is itself a legitimate commercial product. The scammers are simply making use of it as their remote access tool.

Just wanted to say thanks for advice offered. Scam has been confirmed in the local press:

Dyfed-Powys Police are warning people not to fall victim to a telephone scam which is currently targeting people in the area. The force has had a number of complaints from people who have received phone calls from callers saying they are Microsoft Engineers. The caller states that there are viruses on the victim’s computer and the system is running slowly because of this. These can be fixed if the victim logs into the computer and follows the callers’ instructions. After identifying that the system is infected they ask for credit card details for payment for software and are very insistent.

Karen Burch E Crime Wales Business Officer said that the changes made could disable the anti virus security installed and result in files being deleted. "Our advice is simple," she said. "Do not give personal information to strange callers. "Microsoft employees do not ring their customers. Do not access your PC on the directions of a strange caller.”