I picked up the phone a few minutes ago and an Indian-sounding gentleman asked to speak to Mrs Jackson. I acknowledged who I was and he asked if I remembered speaking to him last week - no I didn’t. Anyway, he proceeded to tell me that my computer was sending his company emails generated by a virus that was in a hidden file on my hard drive. I became a little suspicious at this point.

He wouldn’t/couldn’t tell me which email address these reports were coming from, I pointed out we have three PCs running XP so I couldn’t tell which one had the supposed virus. I also mentioned I had an IT degree and that I knew all my anti-virus software was up to date. He asked which one, I eventually said AVG at which point he started to tell me that AVG didn’t fully cover PCs against viruses (Question: would he have had a similar tale if I’d said McAfee or Norton?).

I was getting fed up by now and told him I had no idea who his company was and that he was effectively cold calling me. He told me to go to http://www.supportonclick.co.uk and check out their website and if I called them back to ask for Josh as that was his name. It took me a while, and I remained polite, but I did get rid of him.

I looked up the company (they are based in Calcutta I believe) and they do offer paid online remote assistance (btw he had mentioned that I needed to speak with one of their Microsoft Certified technician) but I felt that, if I hadn’t been fairly knowledgeable about my computers I could have been worried about what he was saying and signed up for whatever he was pushing on me - and I can think of one friend immediately who would have been very worried and done just that.

Anyway, thought I’d share this with you so it can possibly get around ITPro readers and maybe stop them from paying for something out of terror. Here’s a link to a forum that discusses Support Onclick.