On a Chromebook? Please, do tell how. - I agree you can root but who is going to blow the cycles to target a Chromebook/Linux environment?
My mother was getting these calls and they were freaking her out because she doesn’t have a computer.
I just told her that next time they rang, tell them you’ve made a note of the date and time of the call and you will be referring them to the Police.
She did, they hung up straight away and never called back.
No OS is immune from social engineering.
Agreed.
From the OP, “My dad called this weekend and mentioned that a company calling themselves “windowsoft.net” …”
Dad: “Windows? I use a Chromebook.”
“Click”.
No matter how many times I explained to my dad what phishing emails were, and despite him working with computers for almost 40 years of his life whenever he got a stupid phishing email he would freak the hell out and communicate to the scammers.
I found out he was replying to every phishing email, saying stuff like sir I do not have a bank account at the bank of Angola and if I do I want this account closed immediately please email me back to confirm sir. GROAN.
I found out he was doing this when he told me he discovered a scammer had opened a paypal account in his name and he was furious, emailing paypal nonstop and demanding this account be closed. He was sending emails to something like admin@p@ypal.cn!
I was only kidding as well, but you totally fell for it. 
Windows (as of May 2014) has an estimated 61% market share of web clients and 91% share on desktop devices. If the Chromebook ever approaches those levels, scammers will target it. The Chromebook certainly has some big advantages in terms of security, but the lack of hack attempts has more to do with scammers going where the money is.
I constantly get “windows help line” calls i used to at least be civil but now generally i call them lairs or ask if their family’s know they are lairs and hang up, my son is crueler and spends a lot of time chatting to them though.
I never used to get them its only since i changed ISP to British Telecom. I strongly suspect they sold my number to spammers or their India “help” line did.
You definitely don’t want to fall into their lairs. 
A scam that they almost got my elderly mother with recently was one where she swore that she talked to her grandson (my nephew, who’s 39), and he told her he had been arrested in Mexico and needed $900 wired to him to get out, and not to tell his mother (my sister)!
It got stopped only because my sister happened to call my mom, who sounded rattled, so she headed over to my mom’s house to check on her. My sister had a hard time convincing my mom that the grandson was at my sister’s house just an hour or so earlier, and the person she thought she talked to was not him.
A friend of mine, a college professor and really bright, fell for that. He wired the money so they called him back and asked for more. He called me because he didn’t have any more cash in the house. I tried to tell him it was a scam, but he insisted it wasn’t. Luckily, he thiught it over on the way to wire the money and called his daughter instead.
I think I read that there is something in the aging process that makes people more susceptible to this. I know my husband would fall for it, and I’m frightened that there will come a day when I will.
The astonishing thing about the grandkid in jail scam is that the callers don’t know the name of the kid. How do you not ask “Which grandkid is this? I have several.” or some such?
Note that phone numbers of elderly people are invaluable. If there’s one in your household, you will get a lot more calls than those that don’t.
I had a friend who fell for this.
He got a call that went something like this:
“Grandpa, I’m in trouble”
“Zack, is that you?”
“Yes, this is Zack, can you send $2,000 by Western Union…”
He actually got taken by this guy twice, until he figured it out.
That’s what happened to my friend, exactly. They called him Grandpa, and he just assumed. He swore he recognized the voice, but I think it was just the fear that someone in his family was in trouble.
I got one of those calls, and I want to thank the straight dope for preparing me for the scam it was.
I listened for a while, sort of followed the instructions, agreed that there were lots of ‘errors’ in my computer and got to the point of going to the site that allowed connection to my computer and then pulled the plug.
They called me back twice, insisting I had a problem only they could fix. :rolleyes:
Biased Little Pig is biased.
Given I have had to use Microsoft products on and off since MS-DOS 2.11, you’re damn right I’m biased. The world may have been a better place if Bill Gates had gone into heating and home repair.
Interesting interview with Brian Krebs. The last ten minutes should convince you to keep your elderly parents with their Windows based computers off of the Internet.
And if my Chromebook gets hacked (good luck with that) I don’t give a shit. There is no physical media on the box where anything gets stored. I keep all physical storage media away from the box. If the OS does go down I just throw in a SD card with a Chrome recovery image and in 30 seconds I’m back. And yes, the Chrome web browser has been hacked, but on a (trumpets please) Windows host.
There’s a few more security hoops I jump through to get anywhere near my Google accounts/Google Drive.
I feel for the OP (beowulff) because I used to go through the same thing with my father. Because I was his default IT Specialist I damn near got an unpublished phone number. If my father were still alive I would have bought him two Chromebooks and been able to catch up on my sleep.
I’d agree if the scammer was attempting to create a zombie machine or something, but if he’s going after your bank account then access to the machine isn’t terribly necessary. Just get the target to install a Chrome plugin and there’s plenty of damage that can be done.
Yes, anyone can do anything to anyone. I’m not going to debate that and if anyone wants to gnaw on that issue then create a new thread. Google is pretty good about keeping the Chrome browser legit. Seems easier under Chrome OS which they control. (I don’t expect Google to be able to respond to all of Microsoft’s foibles). Do some searches.
Again, I am recommending a Chromebook for elderly parents who cruize the net. If you want to go play in traffic, feel free.
This is interesting. So I wonder if it can happen to ANYONE, as long as they’re old enough, or is it possible to keep healthy skepticism throughout my life?