Be warned: if someone phones you up, out of the blue, and tells you that they are a computer support company and that your computer is infected with viruses, just hang up. Don’t let them talk you into visiting their website, certainly don’t let them load anything onto your PC, and don’t pay them any money.

There is a company ringing people up in the Caversham area. When you reply they tell you, in broken English on a poor line, that they want to help to fix your computer, as they have detected that it has viruses. They first rang me a couple of months ago. Because my job is helping people with computers I let them take me through their spiel – it is very scarey. They tell you all sorts of intimidating stuff about viruses, then get you to go into obscure bits of Windows and tell you that what you see is a result of virus infections. The first time they rang they implied that they had been asked to contact me by Microsoft, which is clearly nonsense: Microsoft just don’t do that sort of thing. After trying to scare me for a while, the initial caller then passed me over to a second person, supposedly because of the seriousness of my infection. This second person, who spoke better English, started heading toward the sales pitch, but they must have spotted that I knew a bit too much about the computer’s internals, because the line suddenly disconnected.

Since then I have been rung twice more by them, each time with a different company name, and I have spoken to several of my Caversham customers who have also been rung and are (understandably) worried. It looks as though they are working their way through the local phone books. This scam has been around for about eighteen months, apparently, in different parts of the world; although I hadn’t come across it locally until recently.

I suppose I ought to qualify this by saying that it is theoretically possible that your Internet Service Provider might contact you, as they do have the tools to detect some types of viruses being sent out by your system. But if they ring you they will clearly say who they are (and you should recognise the name) and they will already know your name. I’ve never actually heard of an ISP doing this, but it is possible. But they wouldn’t ask some unknown support company to do it for them.

Fear sells: there are also pop-ups that might appear when you are online that pretend that you are infected, and I have recently seen scam emails purporting to be from BT (but which actually came from elsewhere) which said the same thing. Apparently the online scams have raked in hundreds of millions of dollars for the perpetrators, so it is no wonder others are trying variations on the same approach.

If you are worried about your PC being infected, firstly make sure that you have an up-to-date antivirus program on your PC and go into it to properly check its status. Run a full computer scan to check nothing nasty is there (except cookies, they are not a worry). If you are still worried contact a reputable local computer engineer, there are at least two in the caversham.info directory.