Home Computer Training

Changing the CMOS battery on a desktop motherboard is usually fairly quick, but on this gaming PC had to remove the graphics card, DVD and cooling fans for the CPU to find it!

Earlier this week I had a call from a regular customer who had fallen victim to a phone scam. When he told me the details, I realised this was a bit more sophisticated than the usual 'tech support' scam. The scammers pretended to be from his ISP and (this may have been a lucky guess) asked if he had noticed work being carried out locally. As it happened, there had been work on running fibre optic cables in the area, so this supported the authenticity of the call. They went on to ask if he had been experiencing slow broadband speeds (which he had, due to having non-fibre broadband and being a long way from the telephone exchange). They got him to run some speed tests on his PC to show how slow the connection was, and then asked if they could connect remotely to 'do some more tests', which he allowed. He said they were connected for about an hour and showed him various issues due to his slow broadband speeds (similar to the usual scams where they show you all sorts of 'problems' with your PC). But rather than asking for money to fix it (which is the way these calls usually proceed) they then rang off and called back later to tell him that due to the poor service, he was entitled to a refund. At this point they asked for his bank details, which raised some suspicion. He asked them why they couldn't just credit his telephone account. They wanted to know if he used internet banking and when he said he didn't, became angry. By this time, he realised he had fallen victim to a scam, so cut the connection and called his bank in case they tried to take any money.
The trouble with this sort of scam is that now they have all kinds of personal details just from asking and probably found out a lot more rooting around in his PC during the hour they were connected. They may also have left some nasties there, so for the sake of his security and peace of mind, I will be doing a clean install of Windows for him and he will be changing a lot of passwords.
The main point of this post is to warn others. Scam calls of this kind are incredibly common, and even if you are an intelligent person you can get caught. So the best bit of advice is that if you receive any kind of unsolicited call, never believe it is whoever they say it is, even if they try to convince you otherwise. Con artists always have a good story or they wouldn't make a living from it. Disconnect, then call the real company (your ISP, telephone provider, bank etc.) using a number you know is authentic. And never, never, never let anyone you don't personally know and trust take remote access of your computer.

Most people know that they should back up their data, but a lot of them don't actually do it until after they have experienced the worst case scenario.