Received a cold call stating that they (who are they?) received notice I had a trojan and it was going to cause my computer to crash and that it had damaged my firewall so that my anti-virus was not longer working. When I questioned who they were (heavy Indian accent) they claimed they were a company (couldn't understand the name) and the caller was from South Africa. He wanted me to check my registration number to verify that he was legitimate by typing in a command "assoc" and looking for the 12 digit number he gave me. He gave me his email as dutmore_smithit91@holtman.com and a phone number 5005252818 as the cust service number. I put him off by saying I wanted to check this out on my own and I would contact him if I was satisfied he was on the level. Looks like I was correct in my suspicions.
Here's my advice to people who receive such calls:
1: Find out who is calling (ask them). If it is not your ISP, hang up. Your ISP could possibly tell that you have a virus problem, if they are scanning their network. Calls from elsewhere should be considered especially dubious.
2: If they say that they are your ISP, ask for a name, then tell them that you will call the ISP customer service number and ask for that person. This is the safe way of distinguishing bogus calls from real ones. -- AT&T Uverse; Zyxel NBG334W router (behind the 2wire gateway); openSuSE 12.2; firefox 17.0
reply to Notfooled NEVER give any information to someone calling you regardless of who they claim to be, simply tell them you will look into it and hang up.
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