For those who haven’t come across it yet, there’s a scam doing the rounds at the moment with someone from a dubious overseas call centre phoning you and offering to sort out your computer.

Various reasons are offered by someone who vaguely sounds like they know what they’re doing, with an end game of getting you to open up a remote support session to your computer granting them full & unrestricted access to do whatever they wish.

During the call they get you to open up Windows Event Viewer and read out some of the 1000’s of messages that any normally operating Windows machine will produce during the course of normal operations.

Every message is then pronounced as being critical / dangerous / corrupt and you’re warned to not click anything on the basis that it will “activate it” and damage your computer. The real reason for not wanting you to click something of course is that it will be completely benign.

After this “diagnosis” you’re then guided to open up a remote support website (various sites are being used it seems), which accepts a LogMeIn Rescue access code and facilitates a remote support session.

Despite running this in a ring-fenced VM I opted to not proceed much further beyond this point, having noted the code to forward it over to LogMeIn 🙂