I’ve just had a phone call from an Asian bloke claiming to be from “Windows technical support” telling me that my computer has been hacked and they’ve been sending me messages for the past couple of weeks to warn me about it.
I have to say that even though his English was appalling this bloke did seem quite convincing, and from the background noise he did appear to be phoning from a call centre.
When I pointed out to him that if he’s from Microsoft he will be able to tell me my Windows product key number he just pretended not to understand what I was saying 
He then gave me a number which presumably he wanted me to put into my computer, I say presumably because as his English was so bad we didn’t really get that far, and even if we had there’s no way I’m taking any notice of some random numpty who claims to be from Windows technical support
Anyway as I could barely understand him, and as as he appeared not to understand me when I told him what a [zb]ing idiot he is I eventually hung up.
So straight away I Google “Windows tech scam” and find that this scam has been around for years, since about 2008 in fact, apparently they take control of your computer, play havoc with your files and then charge you for the privilege of having your computer screwed 
There’s a story about it here
So be warned that these morons are phoning people in the UK, I’m sure the good people on this forum are too savy to be fooled by this sort of scam, but people do get taken in, so beware that this is a scam so hang up 
Tried keeping the guy talking and holding on while I rang 999 on a mobile to see if the call could be traced, but apparently not. Only way is if you can get a number to ring back on.
Been going on for donkeys years that, no one, not Microsoft, not Apple, not ANYONE will ring you out of the blue to fix your PC.
They’ll direct you to the ‘event viewer’ (on windows) which is a record of every error message ever displayed. As you can imagine if you’ve had the PC a while there’ll be thousands of entries and they try and tell you that every entry is a hacker or virus. Utter nonesense. Next time play along and pretend to be really stupid with the PC. I had them on for nearly an hour because every time they said “OK please be click the start button” I’d say “OK I’ve shut down, now what?”
After that I set up a virtual XP machine with files on the desktop called holidaypics.zip, passwords.txt and bank.doc on the desktop full of nonesense so I can safely mess with them, but so far havn’t gotten another call. Since they’re out of the country there’s ■■■■ all you can do to stop it so might as well string them along - the longer you are messing them about the less time they have conning the less savvy out of their hard earned.
On Thursday dinnertime , my wife had a similar telephone call from an Asian who called
himself " Jimmy " . He gave her the same B.S. story , but he didnt gain any details. Luckily , she managed to get a telephone number on dial-back` which she retained to forward to the
Police if it happens again.
Bloody evil foreigners like them should be caught and strung up. 
Cheers, cattle wagon man.
cattle wagon man:
On Thursday dinnertime , my wife had a similar telephone call from an Asian who called
himself " Jimmy " . He gave her the same B.S. story , but he didnt gain any details. Luckily , she managed to get a telephone number on dial-back` which she retained to forward to the
Police if it happens again.
Bloody evil foreigners like them should be caught and strung up.
Cheers, cattle wagon man.
Police won’t be interested since there’s nothing they can do against call centers at the far side of the world direct dialing over here. Even the telephone preference service can’t stop it, for exactly the same reason - they have no remit in India.
Have fun with them. Tell them you’re on Linux and other such nonesense to tie them up for a while.
Been going on donkeys, if you know what you’re doing play with them but if you don’t tell them to go elsewhere.
I’m hoping to get a call some day…
I’ve just had another one of these calls and only managed to keep the Muppet on the phone for about 10 minutes 
I’ll try harder next time
I’ve had one on for 20 mins before. Played dumb, and advised I had two machines, so which one was it? Both apparently. Anyways, I follow the instructions as best I can. But can’t for the life of me find the start menu. Its just not where the kind indian man said it was. Can’t find My Computer either.
Funnily enough the phone went dead when I said I had a Macbook and a PC running Ubuntu!