UPDATE:
It appears this has been around for awhile, according to this Ars Technica article. Amusingly, the same guy got another call from these bozos. Sadly, I have to agree with some of his conclusions. Happily, these bozos also got a dose of their own medicine.
There seems to be no end to what scam artists will try. Whether it’s claiming you’ve won a big prize to other well known concoction, they never seem to run out of hooks. I just took a call from one the Wife had previously dealt with, and I dispatched him with great prejudice.
Unfortunately, the caller blocked their phone number, so my caller ID came up with “Private Caller.” But after picking up, there was a pause, which is always a bad sign, followed by some fellow with some kind of accent telling me he was contacting me about something. I couldn’t catch what the something was- a combination of the accent and what seemed to be a crappy phone connection. After about 4 times, I finally heard enough to understand: he was returning our call about tech support for our computer.
The problem was, I hadn’t called anyone about tech support for our computers. I AM tech support for our computers.
I told him this, and he innocently replied “Are you sure someone didn’t call about tech support?”
Now I was mad, because this was so obviously some sort of scam. My guess is they wanted to put some kind of malware on our computers that snooped username, passwords and anything else of value they could pull of our computers, possibly some kind of keyboard tracker as well.
So I got belligerent and started demanding to know how he’d gotten my number. I went through this about 3 times, he’d reply with some kind of BS, I’d call him on it and demand to know how he got our phone number. He finally hung up on me. With any luck, they removed our number from their system.
So be on the lookout for this kind of crap. Obviously, someone thinks it’s the next big thing.