Ask Leo! #625 – Avoiding Tech Support Scams, Internet Of Things, and more…

Leo, thank you for your good work! However I disagree with the article's apologetics on behalf of Microsoft. Microsoft has far exceeded my threshold of abuse and NEGLIGENCE to its users. This is the beginning of a rapid end to a 20 year relationship with Microsoft, where I will find alternative resources for my needs wherever possible, and recommend the same to All that I know. Their inconceivable arrogance and negligence is way way way over the top in locking me out ***MY*** hotmail/Live email accounts.

Really? A frequent international traveler. Now I traveled from home in Japan to family in the USA, and Microsoft suddenly locks me out. ***NOTE*** None of my banks locked me out from online banking, nor did yahoo.mail or gmail. Somehow, a simple flight in the year ***2016*** is this huge premise for security lockdown from my own account... to extract even more personal information from me, and then still nothing. While I'm visiting the U.S. for treatment for Heart Failure, I'm cut off from correspondence with my hospitals in Japan and the U.S., my health insurance, medical payment sites, emails from my banks, friends, place of employment, my OneDrive documents including phonelists and password lists, etc...

No Leo. Microsoft is royally damaging 10's of thousands of users; as any search on this topic will show. Microsoft could ***at the very least*** have a link at the top of their hotmail/Live mail page that asks: "Traveling soon? Don't get locked out of your account" that links directly to askleo.com and your solutions. Right?

I'm sure that Microsoft has a policy against officially supporting any third party solutions site over which they have zero control (i.e. Ask Leo! :-) ).

However you'll get no disagreement from me: Microsoft could absolutely be handling this better, and they don't need to be linking elsewhere to do it. My "apologetics", as you call it, are simply to explain why they've taken the steps that they've taken.

Two comments: First my husband fell for the Microsoft call but luckily he handed the phone to me as I am more computer savvy. I decided to have some fun with the caller. I played stupid and kept him thinking he had a sucker on the line for 1/2 hour until he asked me to install remote access software. I told him I wasn't going to do that; who do you think was panicking now?! Lol.

Second, a friend of mine called me in a panic saying she got a popup telling her she had a virus and it provided a number to call. It also had annoying non-stop audio. She tried to close the popup (which occupied the entire screen) to no avail. In this case there was no way to even close the browser, so I hit Ctrl Alt Del to access the Task Manager but even that couldn't close the program and it regenerated multiple times. I did Ctrl Alt Del again but this time I logged off. When I logged in again, the popup had disappeared. A scan revealed no malware so all was good again.

Very important video, Leo. Thanks for posting.

I forgot to mention in the video that they scammers often use audio, particularly a computer-y sounding text-to-speak voice to further intimidate you with claims that your computer is infected. Once again, legitimate providers will not cause your computer to yell at you. :-)

"So much information will survive thousands of years from now...." - And 95% of that information will be cat videos. Googols and googols of cat videos. All duplicated across multiple platforms - from Facebook to YouTube - and safely backed up for posterity in multiple geographically redundant data centres.