• In trying to diagnose a computer problem, the technician quickly ran a command from a DOS prompt and told me to watch for red text … that meant that the machine had been compromised
• He said that I had a critical “level 5” severity problem and that both of my computers had been partially compromised (I don’t know how he could tell because he never had access to my laptop)
• He said that the server damage was less than 40%, but when I asked for clarification, he did not clearly explain how he knew this (or which computer he was actually referring to)
• He charged $199.99 to my credit card and said a technician would call in an hour about my laptop
• He then said he needed to check every computer in the house
• He then went back to the server and said to fix the compromised situation caused by hackers, it would cost and additional $139.99 and to give him my credit card again
• He then said it would cost an additional $149.99
• When my husband asked specific questions about what was happening, he backed off and said, “If you can fix it yourself, go ahead.”
• He hung up and said a technician would call about the laptop
• My husband and I reviewed the commands he typed from the command prompt by scrolling back through the list
• The most recent command was “netstat –ano”
• Scrolling up one more command, the command prior to the netstat command was “color c” which according to the internet sets the text color to red
• The command prior to that was dir/s, which just lists the files in the directory
• Because the commands were executed so rapidly, the effect was to do a directory list of the files in white so quickly that I could not read it, change the color to red, and do a netstat so that the results appeared in red, which he told me to watch for as an indication that the computer had been compromised … when it was just him changing the color on the computer.
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