Virtual PC Doctor

[Ian in Northampton]

Just had an 'interesting' call from an Indian call centre claiming to be the above company (there's certainly a fairly pukka looking web site out there of a company based in North Carolina, who I guess might have outsourced their cold calling...)  The guy told me that there were programs executing in my machine that could cause it to crash, and he was going to help me avoid that happening.  So he has me hit Start, Run, and then asks me to type 'eventvwr'.  I terminated the call shortly thereafter, not being 100% familiar with what eventvwr does, although I had a fair idea.  So, anyway, I do some research and decide I'll take a look, which confirms what I thought.  My guess is that the guy was going to get me to navigate to the system log, draw my attention to all the red Xs, tell me those were events that could cause my system to crash and then get me to buy a piece of software that would 'fix' the problems.  That's the most optimistic scenario I can think of.  At the other end of the scale, I guess I might have ended up downloading some sort of malware.

I thought I'd post this just to warn others of what looks like a scam of some sort and one that could easily fool those less astute than the Dr, Keyboard community.

Suffice it to say, my system log is littered with errors (as I had expected) - but my system has been (touch wood) very stable for as long as I can remember...

[prak]

I have twice now had similar calls.  After the first one I did a lot of googling and found several stories of people who had been caught by this.  Apparently they charge £100 or so and get you to load some software which allows them to "clean" your computer.  No immediate harm was noticed, but of course the back door you had installed was still open.

The second time the caller got quite angry when I simply said I was not interested.