On a list

We seem to have ended up on some sort of marketing list at the moment as we keep getting cold calls.



Firstly yesterday Grumpy got a phone call offering him a free courtsey hearing exam to see if his hearing was getting any worse. Now you have to admit theres a certain irony in ringing somebody up by phone to ask them if they want a hearing test. How would you know if a person even needs one unless they tell you that " no I don't need a bearing test, I don't have a car?"



Secondly today we had a call from somebody from the "microsoft maintence department" which instantly put me on alert as that straight away didn't sound right. The man claimed that our computer had sent a email to the maintence department to let them know that we had a very very deadly virus that would wipe out our hard disk in only two days and it had come from a area in china.



I told him that this seemed very strange that he had supposedly got this report as we had up to date virius software. He then proceeded to tell me that this was in fact a very deadly and secret chinese virus that was invisible to every form of anti-virus software out there.



At this point all sorts of mental alarm bells were ringing. So I asked him how the operating system could identify the virius and yet anti virus couldn't. He then proceeded to claim that the windows had a line of original code that allowed it to flag this virus and alert the maintence department.



So I then proceeded to ask him why they didn't tell the anti-virus companies how to detect this virus seeing as it was so deadly and could only be detected by windows. There was a long pause before he then claimed that the line of code that allowed windows to detect this virus was top secret and they couldn't tell the anti virus companies.



It was at this point I had enough and told him I didn't believe he was calling from microsoft and put the phone down on him.



A short piece of google-fu later and I was unsurprised to learn that it certainly had been a scam and is intended to allow them to gain access to your computer.



So we're wondering what we'll get tomorrow as there is that old saying that things come in threes!



Later folks