Hi, am calling from Microsoft. Your PC is infected

[kiplette 8,675]

20 minutes ago, jamiegw said:

I highlight the words in an attempt to shift the blame from the victim to the criminal.

 

Yeah, fair point, now I feel a tiny bit bad 

 

2 hours ago, Eric7 said:

Sounds like you need some sort of "parental control" on all his devices. 

 

Yup

 

21 minutes ago, jamiegw said:

After this happened, I gave myself Administrator privilege on her machine, and gave her reduced rights which prevented her installing any software without my knowledge.

 

worked for him

[Dembo 493]

6 hours ago, kiplette said:

I had that 'we know you have porn on your computer, the police will be informed unless you pay x and we will make it go away' thing about 10 years ago. Your whole screen goes bright red with this huge message and it is truly scary. So I immediately took the battery out of the laptop to completely kill it and switched off the router, and then started it all back up again, and lo and behold it was gone.

Not sure why anyone would think that would get rid of something installed on the computer.

 

I looked at my spam folder yesterday and there was a "we have bad news for you" email claiming to have hacked my email, stolen all my personal data and noticed that I liked to enjoy porn sites and have video of me enjoying porn sites. The weird thing is they wanted me to send them bitcoin, but you'd think people technically astute enough to have bit coin wouldn't fall for these scams. OTOH perhaps people gullible enough to fall for these scams are also gullible enough to have bitcoin ... but that's another discussion.

[john g. 37,683]

1 hour ago, Dembo said:

Not sure why anyone would think that would get rid of something installed on the computer.

 

I looked at my spam folder yesterday and there was a "we have bad news for you" email claiming to have hacked my email, stolen all my personal data and noticed that I liked to enjoy porn sites and have video of me enjoying porn sites. The weird thing is they wanted me to send them bitcoin, but you'd think people technically astute enough to have bit coin wouldn't fall for these scams. OTOH perhaps people gullible enough to fall for these scams are also gullible enough to have bitcoin ... but that's another discussion.

I no longer have a landline so hopefully no more Microsoft calls from India or whatever.

But I got a sinilar email to yours today, Dembo. I opened it because it said I have an outstanding bill and it was all in German. I pay lots of bills so you never know.

But, no, it was as as annoying and stupid as your email.

Binned.

[keith2011 2,571]

2 hours ago, Dembo said:

I looked at my spam folder yesterday and there was a "we have bad news for you" email claiming to have hacked my email, stolen all my personal data and noticed that I liked to enjoy porn sites and have video of me enjoying porn sites.

 

I had exactly the same some while back but ignoring it did not stop them sending ever more threatening emails, like "reminder pay up or we will send the video to all you Facebook contacts" which seeing as I am not on Facebook would have been quite a trick, I also don't do bitcoin. In the end I had to delete the email account (not an important one) to get rid of them, my spam screen was not picking them up!

[fraufruit 41,931]

1 hour ago, keith2011 said:

In the end I had to delete the email account

 

You couldn't just report and block them?

[keith2011 2,571]

2 hours ago, fraufruit said:

 

You couldn't just report and block them?

From memory each email came from a different address and the target of the spam was not an address I use any longer for communications with others and since I am the manager of the email  addresses associated with my domain name and can delete email accounts at will it just seemed simpler to dump it and add a new one with a different name.