Another scammer alert!
I had a call from 07452 849328 this morning from a “BT” engineer saying that they have discovered that my IP was public and that this was an issue.
It is NOT an issue so I knew this was a scam but decided to play along to see what they would do.
The steps they asked me to take were.
- Open Google and go to IP.ME. They then asked me to look at the long number and notice that it said my ip was public and that I was from London. (This was wrong as I had logged on with a proxy server and it made it look as if I was in Toronto, but she ignored this when I told her I was in Toronto not London.
- According to the “BT engineer” the public IP was an issue. She then asked me if I use email or facebook to which I said yes.
- The next step involved me going to https://validator.w3.org/ ( Not a scam site) and to type www.email.com into the white box and press CHECK.
- This showed 14 errors and if you scrolled down you will see.
According to the “BT Engineer” the error code 931 meant that my email was compromised, a similar thing when checking www.facebook.com showed even more errors, this time 43! Both of these errors are web site errors picked up by the validator and are nothing to do with any issue on my PC.
The “BT” engineer now asked if anyone had accessed my PC or router in the last few days which may have resulted in my IP being public, I said no. BT then offered to help me to correct the “issue”. She gave me her BT id TP162051 and asked me to go to rhelps.us ( SCAM SITE !!!!). I pretended to go to the site but had some “issues” which the engineer very kindly spent some time helping me sort out!
The next step was to download and open a file from rhelp.us
(SCAM SITE DO NOT ACCESS !!!) of course I did not access or download the file.
The engineer then gave me a code 69581 which I was supposed to use to log into the site.
She then asked me:
Can you see a chat box on the right-hand side, yes I said.
Does it show my BT ID TP162051? Yes (!)
What does it say in the chat box?
I replied it says “You have been talking to a scammer for 20 minutes.”
The “BT engineer” gave a laugh and put the phone down!
Scammers are always changing the way that they try and gain access to your PC. I had not seen this series of steps used before, but the process of trying to gain your confidence by showing you “errors” on your PC before trying to get to the point where they can access your PC is the same.
Having a public IP address is NOT a problem so please ignore the scammer who starts with this opening line!