Gullible

Yesterday I exhibited incompetence regarding my own razor. While today I exhibited gullibility regarding my broadband connection.

We were phoned up at around 1300, just as we were tucking into our meat loaf, by a young lady claiming to be phoning from some central London address for BT. A young lady with a strong accent, quite possibly sitting in some call centre in the far east. Communication was not easy.

I was a little suspicious, but I vaguely recalled speaking to a BT call centre in the subcontinent or in the far east before and I have certainly spoken about fraud to an HSBC call centre in the subcontinent. So it was not impossible that the call, purporting to be about some invisible-to-me problem with my broadband connection which might well get worse, was genuine.

After a short while I am passed to someone described as a supervisor, but in any event a young man with rather better English.

He takes me through various trickery, involving command prompts and peering at system information. Including him being able to recite to me a long identifier that I was looking at, rather like the license numbers that you get when you buy MS Windows or Office, but not the same. And including looking at a log which was full of errors and warnings to do with the internet connection. Oh dear says the man. I think we need to do a bit more checking. Please use the command line to go to this website.

At which point I start to think that BT would not ask me to do such a thing. So I go to Chrome to find that the site is called TeamViewer (see reference 1) and looks far too tricky for comfort so I tell the young man that I am going to check with BT. At which point he gets rather cross. I have been talking to you for fifteen minutes so why are you getting difficult now. At which point I put the phone down.

Pick it up again to find him still there. Hold the trigger down for a bit, he goes and a dialling tone comes.

In short order I am talking to the excellent BT IT Help Desk (a subscription service) and the young man there knows what is going on almost before I tell him. Nothing wrong with that error log, that is what you would expect. With the wheeze being for you to get the wind up, to get going with a shared session with TeamViewer, probably in itself perfectly respectable, damage your computer and then, amid clouds of waffle, for them to suggest that you stump up a couple of hundred quid for them to mend it. Another time, the man from BT tells me, you will know that it is not us, if only because we use xxx for shared sessions, not TeamViewer.

The call centre number involved has now been blocked using the BT custom call blocker (a free service), a blocker which has reduced the volume of nuisance calls to a trickle.

After the event, BH explains that she thought it was all a bit dodgy all along, but she did not like to interfere in this man stuff.

Quite an elaborate scam with quite a complicated script, one which would only work with a just about IT literate person such as myself. Enough knowledge to follow the instructions, but not so much as to smell a rat. A little knowledge is dangerous and all that. Elaborate and time consuming, but I suppose that if each operator catches one gull a shift, their employer is going to be turning a respectable profit. The operators gets to eat the gulls, fishy taste and all. One almost feels sorry for them.

Reference 1: https://www.teamviewer.com/en/.