I just got a cold-call from gbmsupport.net. They claimed they knew viruses and malware were being downloaded to my computer, and they were calling to help me out. Lucky me!
First, they needed to have me run some software from their website so they could check to see if my computer was under warrantee. We had quite a wide ranging discussion about this, and they told me their company was so unbelievably generous that they would provide support under another company's warrantee!!! Finally, I convinced them that my computer was old enough that it was out of warrantee, and so I was declining to run their software on my computer.
But they were not deterred! They still wanted to me to run their software to check for malware. I don't know why, since they already "knew" it was there (see 1st paragraph). After wide ranging discussions about software, spoken language (see below), their website, and their attempts to walk me through some of the operating system of my computer, interspersed with multiple suggestions I run their software on my computer (all of which I resisted), they placed me on hold. Forever.
Advice: If someone cold-calls you and wants you to run software from their website on your computer, it's a SCAM. If you think it's legitimate because they claim to be from a company you've done business with, get their name and department, hang up, look up the actual phone number of the company, and dial it yourself. These guys didn't take me; please don't let them take you either!
Challenges:
1. I kept these idiots on the phone for 1/2 hour, wasting their time. They didn't hang up on me, enven after I told them I knew it was a scam! Can anyone beat 1/2 hour?
2. They claimed to be native English speakers, but the first guy I spoke to was almost completely unintelligible, and I had to make the 2nd guy repeat almost everything he said before I could understand him. I wasn't able to convince them to tell me their native language. I noticed they mixed up pronunciation of "v" and "w", and the intonation they used seemed to hint at a tonal language. Can anyone else figure out their native language? They claimed not to be Chinese or Indian. One said he was from Spain, but backed off when I tried to talk to him in Spanish.
Good Luck!