Someone just tried to scam me, so I looked up some information that I got off of them and found that this is apparently a pretty large and successful scam operation, so I decided I would post about it wherever I can just in case anyone else gets a similar call and doesn't have the computer knowledge to spot their bullshit.
They claimed that they worked for Microsoft (Microsoft Care Center I believe she said) and that they received an error message on their end from your machine. Right away, this is bullshit. Microsoft can not monitor your system files and they will not go out of their way to call you and tell you about viruses on your computer even if they could.
If you call them out on it they will persist obviously and tell you that they can prove it. They will tell you to open your command prompt by opening the run interface and typing 'cmd' then they will tell you to write in "ASSOC" and hit enter. This produces a list of file associations, basically it's just a list that tells your computer which file extensions belong to which programs. They'll tell you to scroll to the bottom, and look for this line:
zfsendtotarget clsid 888dca60-fc0a-11cf-8f0f-00c04fd7d062
and proceed to read the ID to you as proof that they are legit. THIS IS NOT A UNIQUE VALUE. The vast majority of windows systems will have this value.
after this, they'll tell you to go back to your run prompt, and launch the event viewer with the eventvwr command, a list which will contain records of any trivial error that may have occurred on your computer, they will use this to try to trick you into believing that you have some kind of virus which is causing the errors you see listed.
This whole part above is all just the setup to convince you of the veracity of the call. Once you're convinced that they're telling the truth they will ask you to allow them remote access to your computer so that they can fix it for you, they will install a bunch of spyware and **** onto your computer, and ask for your credit card to pay for it.
They have found some kind of loophole where they can actually get away with this, because by installing the spyware on your computer, they have provided you with a "service" for which you are paying them, and since you've manually granted them access to your computer, what they're doing seems like it might not be technically illegal (at least not in India, where the scam is being run from).
If the payment goes through your money is gone, and your bank will not be able to reverse the transaction. Normally I wouldn't even bother alerting people about a scam because the chances of it happening would be minimal, but this one seems to be pretty prolific, it's been happening to A LOT of people for quite a while now, authorities can't do anything about it and their methods are very convincing to anyone who doesn't know a good deal about computers, so I decided to warn anyone I could.
oh and here's an article:scam artists