Most of you are aware of telephone scams and will avoid them. For the few who have not heard of these, this is your fair warning.

Scam number one. (We’ve received a lot of complaints about your computer.)

One way or another, the caller gets you to run assoc in a command prompt, or something similar. What appears is a Lot of weird gibberish. Your caller will claim that your PC has been generating complaints; that they have sent you messages and you haven’t responded, and that the output from the assoc command proves they have identified your unique PC and know what they are talking about. They will read for you part of the following text, generally starting after the opening curly bracket.

.zfsendtotarget=CLSID\{888DCA60-FC0A-11CF-8F0F-00C04FD7D062}

If you google that part of the line above, you’ll find that this scam has been going on since 2011 at least. You’ll also learn that what the line actually does, is tell your machine’s Windows File Explorer how to send a file to a compressed (zipped) folder.

The CLSID part is identical on my Win7 and WinXP machines. It is not unique to your machine. Every Windows computer has this identical entry.

Under this con, you might believe your machine is indeed exactly the one they are getting complaints about. You might, under their kind guidance, log on to a website like
www.supportforme.com
which now opens with a warning. Otherwise you might enter the information your phone caller gives you, and thus allow them complete access to your computer.

While ‘fixing’ your error situation, they will compromise you in some way. Perhaps encrypt your entire hard drive. Then you pay them to fix these problems.

Scam number two. You’re about to be arrested for taxes owing.

Your caller is a recording. A name and phone number are given. You’ve run out of time, and unless you settle federal taxes owing asap, you’re going to be arrested. Call this number now.

Generally they accept payment in a wide variety of ways. One of them involved the victim buying and transferring bookstore gift cards. Other transfer methods have been used; apparently some of the time these can be traced back to the recipient.

Your federal government (on either side of the 49th parallel) will not phone you like this. They will not threaten you like this. I know; I had the pleasure of having mis-directed CRA attention arrive at my door. It was a pain, but nobody demanded money while threatening legal action and jail.

Scam number N. There are others. Be careful. Don’t give out anything to an unsolicited caller.