It was a quiet evening in May and being retired, I have lots of time and I was just relaxing when I received the call. A nice man with a very strong accent called - "I am from Windows and I called to tell you that your computer has been hacked." What?" I asked, Hacked! How?
He didn't answered the question but offered to help me. "Great", I said "How can you help? Go to your computer. As I was on the way, he transferred my call to a nice lady, "Christine", with a gentler accent.
Christine directed me to turn on my computer, sign in and she said she would be helping by taking over control of my system. She asked that I go to www.teamviewer.com and download the team viewer program.
After deliberately fumbling around on the download, I installed Teamviewer, 10 minutes or so of conversation and looking for the app I launched and let her take over control of the system. I saw the mouse moving and she actually managed to start System Settings. It was obvious that she had no idea what she was looking at. "What do you use the computer?" for she asked. Well I do a little web surfing, read a book or two and maybe a movie. Do you online banking or facebook?" No, I answered. I do access Facebook but not very often. She looked at the desktop for a while, obviously confused and moved the mouse around, not knowing what to do with the desktop she was seeing.
I asked where the problem was how was I hacked? "I'm not sure" she said, "but there is a problem between your computer, the network and the server." More mouse movement on the screen. "Where is the problem?" "I'll have to talk to our technicians can I put you on hold for 2 minutes."
By the way did I mention, I was working on my
Linux machine. I have a fresh new version of
Ubuntu installed (14.04). It's very nice.
Two minutes later, she says "the problem seems to be in the network somewhere" "Oh good. I can shut down my computer now" and proceeded to do so. Thank you so much Christine, I appreciate you spending more than a
hour with me. Goodbye
Spending that time with me kept them away from some other senior who might have had their financial information stolen.
When I had versions of Windows prior to 8, it was easy to get to Safe Mode by rebooting and selecting F8 when the cursor started flashing. Windows 8 comes up so quickly and that function no longer works.