At the beginning of last week my laptop hard drive failed. It was damaged and I went to my local computer shop where the technician replaced the hard drive, computer was working again.
About three days later I received a phone call, probably from India - certainly Indian accents. They purported to be from Microsoft but I was suspicious. However the man was very convincing and said I will show you what's wrong with your computer, so he accessed it from afar - still can't believe I authorised him to do this. He said that my hard disk would fail again because I had a really bad virus, went into the computer and showed me all these Windows warnings. He said that that's what had happened the first time around when my hard disk failed, and I should not have paid for a replacement hard disk.
Then he proceeded to sell me this package through which a technician would go through and install things on my computer and get rid of the virus. I don't know why I didn't just hang up, but they seemed so legit, I asked for a phone number in Australia, got one, based in New South Wales. So I gave them the go-ahead and paid $194.00.
When the technician started to access my computer remotely, I felt that I had done the wrong thing. I turned it off, turned the internet off, called an IT friend who confirmed this was most probably a scam. I changed all my credit card, account and bank card details as well as all my passwords - huge amount of work.
Since then they haven't stopped calling me or harassing me on the phone and e-mail. I have twice told them (phone, and e-mail) that I am aware this is a scam, and please stop calling, but they won't. They are very insistent, calling up to 4 times every day, sometimes as late as 9:00 at night, when my child is asleep.
What do I do next?
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