Just this afternoon I got a call from “iAssist” who wanted to fix my computer, since it had malware, or was out of support or something. It was the regular fare with them taking over my computer to “fix” it for me. So I let him do just that.
While I “doddered” around and “tried” to boot my computer, I opened an old XP I have for experiments under Parallels, booted up my ScreenFlow screen capture, did a system snapshot, and then let him have at it. He’d called me on our home number on a DECT phone, so it took me a while to figure out how to get the sound, but finally I simply held a little Olympus hand recorder next to my ear, and that’s pretty good. Had to make him wait, mumbling something about having a prostate problem or something, while I got out the recorder, located batteries and got it started.
The whole thing is 34 minutes. The first 6 minutes or so are silent, then 2-3 minutes of only my voice (I’d turned the Olympus the wrong way up… duh), then after that it’s pretty clear. Note that the sound is offset by 10-20 seconds, so some places may look weird.
What he was after, once he got me, a “living alone 74 year old man who only uses his son’s old decrepit computer (seven years old computer) every sunday” (really; he asked me twice if I lived alone), hooked up was selling me an extended support for Windows and all my machines for only 3200 SEK for five years. That’s $500 by the way. Once I got to the screen where I had to enter my billing info, I quit the charade. After telling him twice that we were in a virtual machine and I had recorded the whole thing, he just hung up.
In the recording, you’ll see my name, street address, and phone number; that’s what he typed in. The email, I gave him (momo..something at hotmail.com, couldn’t think of anything better at the drop of a hat).
As far as I can figure out, iAssist (and LogMeIn) have nothing to do with this, but Southend Enterprises almost certainly do. That’s the “PCSupport” page I’m supposed to enter my payment data into. I found other people on the net reporting on this shady company.
I posted the whole recording on youtube, if someone wants to see them do this thing and hear this guy’s piercing and ennervating voice. It’s pretty boring, but maybe someone gets a kick out of it.
One really, truly, funny thing is that somewhere along the way, there’s a Parallels dialog box that pops up and says “Parallels tools are installed”, and he just clicks it away. I can’t locate it from the video, and I don’t want to watch it all again. Somebody told me it’s at 26:50 approximately. Also, there’s the “Parallels Shared Folders” icon in the upper left corner of the desktop, and even that didn’t tip him off.
So today I got a followup call from Customer Satisfaction at Southend Enterprises. Really. To hear if my machine worked fine today. Turned into two five-minute talks, where it’s pretty clear the guy (not the same guy as yesterday) either really is a fine actor, or (more likely) has no idea what he’s doing. But “persistence” is clearly his middle name.
The audio is even worse than yesterday’s recording. Maybe I should set up a rig to record these “artists” better, if this goes on. Here it is: