My father-in-law purchased a $400 lifetime support contract with a company (Cyber PC Experts).
Recently his computer has been acting up—running very slowly—so he requested support. The service tech took control of his computer remotely (from India) and pretty much fixed the issue.
A few days later, he gets an email from them saying that they need to check his computer again because it was hacked.
They did a few things to his computer while he was watching to show that it was “hacked.” Then proceeded to try to sell him a ~$1000 software/config to clear current “hacks” and to thwart future hacks.
I wasn’t involved until I heard this and went over to his computer and took over the phone conversation with the tech that was remotely using his machine.
My father-in-law told me that they showed him an IP address and then showed him the geographic location of the IP address and said that was where the hacker was. They even zoomed in and showed the building. It was a location in Los Angeles… Where my father-in-law lives.
I used a website to “Find My IP” and it matched up with IP address that the tech was showing him. Basically I think it was the public address that our cable provider shows as public for our home. I tried to “Find My IP” using other computers at his home and it gave the same IP address. So it was probably Time Warner’s data center.
The tech on the other end was also showing him the output of the netstat
and top
commands. They were telling him that there were a lot of “sleep”-ing processes and that supposeduly means his computer has been compromised. They also said that the high % of idle CPI cycles means that the computer was slowing down.
So, I basically kindly declined to buy the ~$1000 software to clean out his computer and prevent future hacks.
Am I right to call their bluff? Has anyone else encountered this kind of scam before?
Here are some report on Cyber PC Experts: