social engineering scam.

[Johnny420]

I run only Linux at home. So I am surfing G+ and get a call on my land line at home from a guy claiming to be Microsoft. He says that my computer is sending them errors that need to be fixed right away.
<Giggle>
So I let him think he is leading me thru windows to my security settings and then I tell him that I cant find my internet explorer on this damn ubuntu machine..lol
He gets confused and I tell him that I am a tech geek and he is full of excrement.
I Googled the number he called me from and found that a few people are complaining about him but nothing has happened for at least a couple of weeks.

My question is... Who should I report this to??

[NovaAesa]

Not sure about the protocol in America, but in Australia I would be calling the police and the would be able to pass it on to whoever should know about it. Either that, or I would call Crime Stoppers. I think USA has Crime Stoppers too.

[kaldor]

This was on the news here in Canada a few weeks ago. I'm amazed at people who would actually fall for something like that. Even to a non-geek, how does that sound reasonable?

"Hi, we're from the biggest tech company in the world and you, out of all our customers, are causing problems to our network due to a virus. Please give us your credit card number and let us connect to your PC and we will fix it for you."

How people manage to fall for that confuses me to no end :(

[robert shearer]

Yeah, it is a worldwide problem.
Even here at the bottom of the world....

http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/news/4640137/Computer-phone-scam-continues

though we do have a low tech solution as that newspaper report states....


''get a loud whistle and blow it very hard down the phone'' LoL.

[Aquix]

My question is... Who should I report this to??

Think most countries has at least one website that collects numbers from scammers so report it there. Important thing is to get the number to show up in a google search. As for the police I think it's hard since they didn't actually get any of your money, but you could try.

[Johnny420]

I will try http://www.crimestoppersusa.com/ and Thanx for the advice.

[NMFTM]

My question is... Who should I report this to??
Me, I just need your name, address, DOB, and social security number to verify that you're who you claim to be.

[SacValleyDweller]

A while back I got a similar call, very fishy. Didn't quite know what to do about it, so I brushed him off, hung up on him.

Glad it was me that answered, and not my grandpa. He might have hit the panic button and then he would have had a bucket of questions for me that I would likely not have had the answers to, despite 2 years of computer science courses.

[sydbat]

Discussed ad-nauseam in this thread - http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1753968

[drawkcab]

In soviet russia tech support calls you!!!

[forrestcupp]

Gee. I got a call from the same guy, and I thought he was very helpful.

[drawkcab]

Someone really needs to record this guy and post it.