My mum had a call the other day from someone claiming to know that her computer was slow and/or had a virus. By unfortunate coincidence when she turned on her computer the Microsoft Windows Genuine Advantage popup popped up, making her think there might be something in the call. Fortunately she was genuinely busy, asked them to call back and called me. My first thought was who would have her number? Certainly not Microsoft. Possibly her ISP, who, unless they were being extremely vigilant, would be very unlikely to call her about computer problems. After a bit of googling I decided it was probably this scam. Today they called back, and sure enough mentioned the website/company that Staffordshire trading standards warned against, www.supportonclick.com.
Also see my update.
UPDATE: Several comments on this post claim that SupportOnClick is genuine, it's not, and my mother is still receiving calls from them despite the fact that there is nothing wrong with her computer and she has asked them not to call her. I am now going to close comments on this post, but if anyone from SupportOnClick would like to contact me, or sue me, I would welcome their comments, and an explanation as to why my mother is still being harassed.
There is now a series of videos on YouTube chronicling one of these calls. It's pretty boring to be honest, it starts to get interesting with the third video.
UPDATE March 2010: My girlfriend's dad has now also had this happen to him, he was instructed to install TeamViewer and told he could call them back on 02033185274.
UPDATE: This has now reached BBC News. And I missed this original story from the register.
London after COVID
2 years ago
11 comments:
Hey, I am from Raleigh, North Carolina and got a call from these guys a few days back. Asked if my computer was running slow. I usually get hundreds of calls offering free trips to best card deals, and I usually hang up on them.
Dunno what happened, I told these guys yes. And let me tell you, they were just fantastic. My computer is considerably fast now. No idea why they are called scams, but they really helped my computer gain speed, and that's what matters to me.
Riiiight "Daniel". Funny you don't mention how much they charged you, nor what they actually did to diagnose the problem nor fix it. Neither do you explain why you would trust an unknown third party with full access to your machine. For all a user knows supportonclick start by getting malware onto a machine to slow it down, claim to (be able to) fix it then once they have full access install more malware to harvest usernames, passwords, credit card details, etc. Even if you are a real person and what you say is true I would say it's a psychological effect, the homeopathy of the computer world if you like, I'll do that for half the price.
this is Jose Beller,yes i'm afraid i was one that was caught,i can't believe it ,they got 385.00 aud out of me believed that they would fix my pc,they made it worse,so please don't get sucked in like me. This is a warning to everyone please be careful whom you let in to your pc. I thought that it was a genuine company taking interest in my situation but i was proven very wrong.
I have just had an out of the blue contact from them and when I told them that GOOGLE had flagged it up as a scam they put the phone down
Hi Jamie,
This is Laura. I received a call from these guys recently. I did not know about such scams and believed what they said. I was facing problems with the antivirus I installed on 19th July. They took this "remote access" and worked on it.
But they dint really take money from me. Said I am on trial period. Is it a scam?
Right on Laura. Even I had a great experience. Initially they were cold but then things got better. The scanner was not working and they fixed the problem. Good one supportonclick.
Laura, what is the trial period for? What are they trying to sell you? I would worry what will happen at the end of your trial period, now that you have given them access to your machine they could do anything, they could deliberately slow your computer down at the end of the trial period to force you to buy their bogus software.
Oliver, yet again we hear support for supportonclick without *any* details whatsoever. How much did you pay, what did they fix? How did they fix it? How did they get your number? How do you know that they did anything at all?
Yes, paid $99 and got subscription. I call them from time to time whenever I have connectivity errors and issues. The relationship has been smooth till now.
Oliver, surely your ISP should be giving you help when you have "connectivity errors and issues" for no extra charge?
Not really. I do face issues with them. I call, they say will get back and keeps me waiting for more than a week. I am a freelancer and really need things fixed fast. SupportOnClick made it fast so i took help from them. Hope things are smooth. It is definitely not with all as I see.
I fail to see what a third party could do if you have connection issues. What country are you in/from?
Post a Comment