Another attempt: TalkTalk Scam

WE ARE ALL AWARE OF COMPUTER SCAMS.

E-mail from a friend today:
Hi everybody,

Recently, I sent you a couple of emails about being vigilant about scams on your computer. Well, since then, the hackers have got me.

Not only was my computer infected, but the hackers took £4000 from my bank account.

I should say that I gave them £4000, without realising what I was doing. This is how they did it;

You may remember that TalkTalk were hacked a year or two ago, and thousands of customers’ personal details were stolen.

On the Thursday before last (6th April), my computer started going very slowly and at Startup, a grey film covered my screen. I guessed that my computer had been infected by some sort of malware, and decided that when I was making lunch at 11.30am, I would do a virus check and clean up. However, at 11.05 I had a phone call from a call centre in India. They said they were from Talktalk and that they were aware that my computer had been attacked. They said that they could fix the problem for me, remotely.

I thought that I should leave it to the experts, so I took my laptop to the phone and started to follow their instructions. The young Indian man was very polite and well mannered, but I couldn’t follow everything that he said because of his accent. He asked me to switch off any other devices such as tablets and smartphones etc, and told me that I would need a new router, which would be delivered to my home the following day.

He asked me to give him the code number from the back of my router, then he gave me the name and details of the driver who would deliver my new router, which he asked me to write down. He also asked me to write down the serial number and code number of the new router, which he read out to me. So far so good.

All of this time I believed that the call was genuine. He said that the reason the virus had got into my device was because my security package hadn’t been working for some time. so when he asked if I would give permission for him to remotely take control of my laptop to dig out the virus, I agreed.

On my screen I saw the cursor moving about on it’s own and an icon called Opera Security popped up on my start screen.

After about two hours of watching lines of data scrolling up the screen, and me writing down 32-digit codes when requested, I was getting fed up, and on a couple of occasions I asked how much longer it would all take.

The polite young man, speaking on the phone, apologised for taking so long and said that I would be given a £200 refund because I had been paying them for their security package that had been switched off.

This is where they pulled off the sting. The man said that £200 had been sent to my bank account and would I check that it had arrived. I opened my Santander bank account, which I recognised, and the recent transactions were correct, but on today’s date, instead of £200 in the deposits in-box, there was £8200. I told the young man that he had sent £8000 too much. He sounded very worried and asked me to send the £8000 back, because it was Talktalk’s money, not mine. I said that I would send it back, and he put the bank account details up on my screen. He asked me to send £4000 and later, another £4000. I went into my online account and sent £4000 to the account number that I had been given.

The security department of Santander banking rang me to ask if my request was genuine and I said that it was, so after giving them some security details, the £4000 was sent.

The young Indian man said that his senior officer wanted to speak to me on the phone, and an older sounding man said that they had received the first £4000 but my account had been blocked and they needed to get the other £4000, and I should ring my bank back and demand that the account should be unblocked.

At last, I started getting suspicious, so I rang the bank’s security department and told them what had happened. The security man listened to what I said, and told me that I was being scammed. He said that the scammers had taken £4000 from my account.

I told him that I’d seen my bank account, and I still had £4200 of their money in my account, but he said that they had showed me a false screen, and they hadn’t sent any money to my account, at all. He told me to hang up my landline phone and switch off my laptop, and he would see if he could get my money back.

About an hour later, he rang to say that the £4000 had gone to a TSB bank account, but they’d succeeded in getting that account blocked. My money was still in there but it would be up to 28 days before it was back in my account.

So, I had a very close shave. I nearly lost a large sum of money to the scammers.

In the evening I took my laptop to Currys PC World, and left it there for a factory reset and malware removal.

I have it back, now, but I’ve had a nightmarish few days trying to get my emails to work. I managed to do that, yesterday, and today, I’ve been retyping all (or most of) my email addresses into my address file.

I really hope this never happens again, but I’ve been warned by the bank that I will be targeted again, maybe not by the same people, but they will have passed around my details to other scammers.

Sorry about the long-winded email, but I thought that you should know how easy it is to get scammed, and if something like this happens to you, be aware.

And I thought that I was being vigilant, more fool me.

My reply:
We rarely get unsolicited calls. Typically once a year. Before we came away I answered 4 phone calls purporting to be from Openreach saying that they had noticed my computer access being slow. I told the Indian sounding guy that I would not carry on the conversation. The world loves a trier!