The Voice of Fraud – Fake Malware

I used to think there was nothing worse than malware.  That was until the evil minds of fraud came up with fake malware phone calls. The scam starts with someone calling you claiming that they have a report that your computer was infected with a virus on their website. While you certainly can get a virus by visiting an infected website, the site owner is not going to know your computer is infected or have a phone number to call you to tell you about it.

The caller then proceeds to establish their “expertise” by walking you through commands on your computer and showing you legitimate logs and files on your computer, but will tell you they are malware and virus files. Once they have convinced you that you have a problem, they typically walk you through enabling them to log remotely into your computer so they can “fix” it for you. Then they ask for your credit card number. The really scary part is that once they are logged into your computer, they can do just about anything they want, including install malware. So if you didn’t have a problem when you got the phone call, you definitely will by the time they are done.

It is hard to believe that computer scams have evolved to this, but I actually personally know someone that got one of these calls. The irony is that they called my brother-in-law who happens to work for Microsoft in their Malware Protection Center. You can read about his experience on the Malware Protection Blog.

To learn more and get information on how to protect yourself, check out Microsoft’s Safety and Security site article on phone scams.