Crooks push fake anti-virus via Skype calls

Scareware pushers have turned to Skype with automated messages to pressure marks into buying worthless 'security' software. The scam is promoted via unsolicited calls on Skype during which a machine-generated message warns potential victims that their computer security is "out-of-date". Victims are invited to visit a website …

[Nigel 11]

If only ....

"most people have wised up to crooks running unsolicited "security scans" that turn up a multitude of bogus problems on their machines."

If only they had.

and

If only they just turned up bogus problems, rather than actively creating very real ones!

[I'm Brian and so's my wife]

I've tried so hard to drill it into my dad about that phone scam, "We've noticed your internet connection is running slowly, call this number & pay for 'support'."

The first time it happened I took to calling the 0800 number and blowing a whistle down the phone at them. Apparently they (or others) called again last week, but he thankfully didn't fall for it.

[VinceH]

Letters, digits.

Quite.

And if only people I know would heed my warnings about such things, rather than come begging to me afterwards to fix their computers.

[Mike Wood]

People have wised up to this? Surely not, I am still seeing several machines a month with this along with getting the occasional phonecall from M/S saying I am infected.

Someone ought to find these scammers and extract the money back, must be enough to buy a small country somewhere!

[Richard Cranium]

I played along...

...with the call from "windows support" having "demonstrated" that "Oh my god your machine is badly infected with a polymorphic virus" (on the basis that there were errors listed in the windows error log file).

Next they sent me to logmein.com (which, shamefully, doesn't give any security warning that naive users would understand) so a "technician" could investigate the problem.

Obviously that's where I stopped but looking around the web, there's people who've been scammed out of $200 - that makes an annual salary from this scam of $50,000 if they get one "success" a day.