Bogus ms techie saying virus in PC operating only in safe boot

[Deleted account 190920002]

Now before anyone says fool she admits she was. This story might help others who you know have had probs
Wife's friend took a call and let this bogus ms guy log into her PC then with dire warnings he told her that the computer had been hacked but that he could remove the problems for payment. Well she twigged too late that it was a scam. Anyway she called me as the laptop was only booting into safe mode (win7) after running Kaspersky etc it found no viruses but still would only boot into safe mode. Then after mucho thinking I ran msconfig and found said tw*t had gone to the boot menu and ticked the start in safe mode box. So the kas would not of course have found any virus and the mystery deepened until as a last resort I looked at the msconfig file.

 

[steadysteve]

Had a similar thing on two occasions now- they waffle on about how they are the only Microsoft approved techies and the massive amounts of error reporting from your comp and then tell you there is tons of kiddie porn on there to frighten you into letting them have remote control of your comp.
This is in between the idle chitchat about the weather, what you do for a living, how many kids you have etc.
I let them rabbit on for a while to waste their time and then hang up.

 

[RedRick Esq.]

Cyber crime !

The one to be aware of which is doing the rounds at the moment is the bitlocker virus/con

They either put it on through e mail attachment or call as in the OP

once bit locker is applied the only way to access is with the key that they hold and demand payment for !

This has proved very popular for the bastards as for many firms it is cheaper to pay the ransom than replace all the hardware !