I was almost a victim of identity theft today. I must have been in a delirious state cuz normally I would have never allowed anyone calling me on the phone to access my machine through a remote session. But here's what happened:
I got an automated call saying that I was charged $299 for a renewal subscription that I had bought from Geek Squad at Best Buy 3 years ago. The message said to call the number back if I wanted to cancel the subscription and get a refund. So for whatever stupid reason (probably cuz I thought it was possible that geek squad signed me up for something I did not ask for years ago when I bought something else from them), I called back and talked to an agent and he told me to go to "cancelmysubscription.website". After a while of back and forth meaningless conversation, he told me that he needed to connect to my laptop via a remote teamViewer session to check and see if my issues had been fixed (or something like that, I don't remember at this point), and again for some stupid reason I told him that it would be fine as long as it didn't take too long.
What I saw go on when he connected gave me the impression that his software was way beyond my comprehension. The first thing I saw was a DOS prompt appear, him type in a few unrecognizable strings in the command line, and then for like 30 seconds strait I saw a flurry of "-", "_" and "|" symbols scroll down the DOS screen in the form of graphics which almost at times looked like a huge directory tree with hundreds of subdirectories. When I saw that I thought I might just stop the process so I told him it was taking too long and he responded with:
"
please sir, just give me some minutes, please follow the instructions I'm going to give you exactly, otherwise my life could be in danger. My manager could also take my job. For my sake, please comply with my requests.
When this process ended, the task manager's "processes" tab appeared and I saw the huge line graph in green and he said "
we are now running a diagnostic check on your machine. Please be patient". Everything ended when he told me he needed my banking info to issue the refund. He was requesting the debit card #, first name, last name, DOB, phone number, email address and full physical address.
I can only guess his software was scanning my entire system for any sensitive information. I consider myself extremely stupid and lucky at the same time, as just last night I transferred literally everything off of the machine he got access to, to an external hard drive, and then on to my brand new machine. The only things left on the machine he got access to were all of my 3rd party applications and browser software. And my new machine does not have an ethernet port on it, so I'm forced to use my phone's hotspot as a router for the time being until I get an ethernet-usb adaptor. And I do not have upper-level features on my phone where I can be on a hotspot and on a phone call at the same time.
I can't believe I got into this whole thing, considering the fact that he was an Indian and said he was calling from Silicon Valley out in CA. When he first called to, the first thing he asked for was my email to verify my Geek Squad account. So because he got that from me and that email is linked to so many financial transactions of mine, past and present, I ended up closing all of my bank accounts and creating brand new ones and getting new credit cards issued with all my providers.
I have no idea how much information a scammer has to obtain in order to assume an identity, but I would assume they can't steal an identity without a social security number.
I've talked to many scammers over the last 20 or so years, but most of them have been recently cuz I'm in the dating scene. I've had prolly 10 different women over the past 4 months ask me for money for various reasons, asking me to send it thru various channels for various reasons. And of course, every one of these women were incredibly gorgeous, and most of them were either living in foreign countries or were originally from a foreign country and now living here in the USA. This "romance scam" has been listed on the department of state's website for years now I understand:
https://www.ag.state.mn.us/consumer/Publications/OnlineDatingRomanceScams.asp
The thing I don't really understand about the women who have attempted to do this to me is why in the hell they would even claim to like me! I've never been that good looking and I consider myself lucky to have dated good looking girls in the past. Many of them have said to me "you're a very good looking man", which of course is BS. As a member of eHarmony, I've gotten countless emails from the security and support team telling me that a match of mine has been terminated. It kinda makes me wonder why women of this nature target someone like me instead of using their beauty to go after the rich businessmen of the world. So many of them really do pay high dollar amounts for escorts, models and just general evenings of affection from a beautiful girl.
So that's the story. Anybody experienced something like this, or even something close?
