About 7:30PM I received a phone call from a fellow w/ a mild Indian accent who said he was calling from my ISP’s “Support Department” because they had detected that my computer was “downloading malicious software and needs to be cleaned up”. That immediately raised a warning flag for me but I wasn’t busy so decided to string him along to see what would happen.
He asked me to open “Event Viewer” and go to “Custom ViewsAdministrative Events”. When asked I told him there were 4,448 errors and warnings listed; he (predictably) spruiked on for a minute-or-two trying to convince me 4,448 errors and warnings is somehow a huge number. But when I told him that those 4,448 errors and warnings go back to mid-August 2016 he changed tack and said he would pass the call to his supervisor.
His supervisor came on the line within a few seconds (too quick, a further sign of a scam) and made further attempts to convince me that the 4,448 errors and warnings constituted a serious problem that needed to be fixed, but when I asked him what specific errors/warnings actually meant he responded by changing tack.
The “supervisor” then asked me to open a command prompt (Win+R, type cmd in the Run box) then type assoc then press enter, which of course displayed a list of file associations. He had me scroll down to the bottom of the list and look for a long entry that started with “ZFSendToTarget”. He then said he would prove he was with my ISP’s Support by reading back to me my computer’s unique ID (???).
Indeed, what he read back to me was “888DCA60-FC0A-11CF-8F0F-00C04FD7D062” which matched what was listed in my command prompt window. He continued to insist that the number was my computer’s unique ID even after I told him I have been a computer technician since 1998 so knew that “ZFSendToTarget=CLSID{888DCA60-FC0A-11CF-8F0F-00C04FD7D062}” has to do with the file association for ZIP (compressed) files and that the “888DCA60-FC0A-11CF-8F0F-00C04FD7D062” number is definitely not unique to any particular Windows system; in fact it is universal since WinXP.
He was still blathering on insisting that it was my computer’s unique ID when I cut in and told him to not call my number again and hung up. Immediately after I hung up my phone rang out then immediately began ringing again about eight times before they gave up.
