www.supportonclick.com Scam

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.