Scam catches couple offguard

At about 5.30pm the couple, who prefer to remain anonymous, received a call on their home phone from a man calling himself “Mike Smith” from an IT solution company called Lets Assist. 

Described as having a Chinese accent, he told the male resident his computer was in “critical mode”.

The local man told Mike “to get lost” and was quick to hang up the phone.

However the scammer immediately rang back telling him “you shouldn’t have hung up, [because] there are so many viruses in your computer”.

In fact, the scammer told the man 84 per cent of his computer had crashed and proceeded to talk him through fixing it.

He told the male to push two buttons on his keyboard, read out their computer code and he was in.

It is believed Mike then infected their computer with several viruses he claimed were there before he rang.

“We thought it was legit,” the man’s wife said. “[My husband] was on the phone for two and a half hours to him trying to fix it.

“[Mike] kept trying to get [my husband] to do the six-year service agreement which was around $1000, but [my husband] wouldn’t take it. He said he would go with the one-year agreement for $149.99.”

They handed over their bank details, but the woman had her suspicions.

“[Mike] had control of the computer, he was moving the mouse around and everything,” she said.

“The thing that freaked me out was that he said ‘nice dog,’ referring to the photo of our dog on the desktop. I was thinking, ‘he can see everything we have on there, all our passwords, our bank pins’.”

The company even sent them confirmation emails following the phone call, but when the wife tried calling the listed phone numbers, they rang out.

“If you look at the terms and conditions you can see there are some words not written properly,” she said.

There was also widespread use of quotation marks, often incorrectly.

That was enough to convince the couple to go to their bank, cancel their credit cards, change passwords and internet logins and take their computer down to a local IT company.

“They could tell straight away it was a scam,” the woman said. “As soon as they opened it up they could see all the viruses.”

She had also heard of another woman receiving the same call recently. Her daughter answered the phone and told the person on the other end they didn’t have a computer.

“And [the caller] hung up straight away,” she said.

Now the couple want others to know these scammers may be targeting homes in the region, warning them not to tell the caller you have a computer.

“We’re not only paying for the scam, we’re paying for our computer to get fixed,” the wife said.

“Thank God they only took the $149 they said they would take and not more. After that I was too scared to get back on the computer, because they could have seen my strokes.”

According to three Young IT businesses this is the only report of this type of scam so far.

But all said IT scams are always going around and this scenario was quite common.

Cootamundra Local Area Command police said they are not aware of any recent reports of scams.

Robyn Davies from Connelly’s Office National said the biggest thing was that “no one actually has access to your computer”.

“They have no way of knowing what’s on there… once they’re given access they can get whatever they want,” she said.

Trude Blizzard from BlizIT said they have had four scam victims in the last year with their latest case in November.

“Never hand over your credit card details and never let them connect to your computer,” she said.

Propellerhead IT in Young have recently been dealing with what is called the “cryptolocker virus” – a virus that locks or crypts the data on your computer, forcing you to pay to get it back.

They have helped 20-30 customers with scams in the last year or two.