Agreed. Or non-technical folks, like customer service. I’ve spoken to plenty of legitimate folks who work for Dell. or my cable company, or Amazon, and they have accents. (Okay, not Amazon very often, that’s rare, but it has happened.) Many legitimate businesses outsource to save costs, and India is a good source of cheap and skilled staff. An accent should never be seen as a red flag.
BTW, keep in mind the absence of an Indian accent may not mean anything any longer. There’s at least one company, Sanas, that has software that can change your accent as you’re speaking.
Most commonly, this sort of thing is the setup for a refund scam; they will call again saying there has been some awful error and they need to refund some money; they try to get the victim to log into online banking while they are connected to the computer, then the blank the screen and edit the appearance of the banking screen so it looks like they have refunded too much, then walk the victim through ‘correcting’ this nonexistent error.
Wiping the PC is still a good idea, but be really careful to intercept social engineering. Talk to your bank; don’t trust any incoming calls
However when the person with the Indian accent claims his name is John or Bill, then you can be pretty sure its a fraud.
When I used to get one of these calls, I’d call the guy by one of the Indian names I know well from working in Silicon Valley. They never objected. But by then they knew I was on to them.
No. They can be using a “Western” name to seem more familiar. I’ve had that plenty with tech support from my tech calls to web hosting providers and whatnot. Not a good litmus test at all – at least in my experience. I can’t remember the last time I’ve heard anyone introduce themselves as Rishin or Krunal or Manish or Aaditaya or whatnot. Add to that that certain segments of Indian populations (like Keralites) will often have Christian names they go by in certain contexts, anyway.
I’m with @pulykamell on this one. Indian accents with Western stage names are nothing suspicious. I used to run a legit US-based call center and everyone, even me as supervisor, had a stage first name we used.
OTOH, when someone with an Eastern European accent answers as “Peggy”, you know you’re about to be taken for a ride:
I would definitely take whatever steps you can to thoroughly clean the PC, including reformatting the hard drive, and removing any partitions on it. I once reformatted my hard drive to get rid of some malware, but it had insidiously created a new partition that seemed official from the name. If the malware wasn’t as obvious as it was, I could have easily thought I got rid of it when I didn’t. I had to reformat the drive again, this time removing the partition.
Yes, good advice. That’s what I always do when doing a reinstall, not only reformatting, but deleting all partitions, then repartioning and reformatting. You can do it with the regular install tools for Windows (do we even know which OS is on the infected computer? Not that it matters much for the strategies recommended, but maybe we could give better instructions how to do a new install).
It’s really not all that necessary to make decisions based on the accent of the person calling you. Make decisions on what they’re telling you.
Is the call unexpected?
Is it something they are claiming is urgent?
Is there money involved?
Are they asking for personal information?
It’s a scam.
^ I mean, of course. And them asking you what you’re going to be doing with your money after you’re gone is … “unusual” doesn’t even begin to describe it (as the OP noted). That’s well beyond a “red flag.”
We called Truist and Stifel Investments and both online accounts are locked down. Now i can get some sleep and take my time with clean install
I’ll defer to the folks who are smarter than me, but would a system restore take care of any nefarious software that has been installed?
Certainly easier and quicker than a complete format and re-install of Windows.
Personally, I would try that first, but I would disconnect it from the internet, and not reconnect it until you have gone through enough of the files to be sure that whatever it is seems to be gone.
I have had good luck getting rid of stuff by running three malware/virus programs simultaneously. Some of these programs that leech on to your computer are good at duplicating themselves as fast as you can delete them. Running several “deleters” at once can overwhelm the program’s ability to do this.
I’d consider less drastic options -if- the OP hadn’t noted that the Scammers had control of the computer and had been installing software for quite some time.
But with that proviso, I’d go nuclear, the full wipe all partitions and rebuild from scratch. Heck, considering how cheap a new hard drive would be, I’d consider replacing it and doing a fresh install of OS as a new machine.
been looking into this. I think when doing the install from the USB, if there is more than one partition, I delete all but the one that says “unallocated space”, then proceed to reinstall? BTW it is Windows 10
That should work, yes. Unallocated space is not actually a partition. It’s just saying there’s no partition in that part of the drive So if that’s all you see, that means there are no partitions.
Windows will then create its own partitions for you on install.
As for the Indian thing, I’d say it’s at most a thing to notice. It’s far more the fact that you shouldn’t listen to an unsolicited call, or anyone you call from an unsolicited message from someone you have not done business with. And, of course, never believe a popup.
I agree that you should install an ad blocker, as those mostly stop these sort of fake alerts. The only exception I’ve run into is if I’m visiting some website I’ve never been to before, usually as part of doing a Google search for information.
I am one who finds himself sometimes rolling his eyes at claims of racism, but damn, this statement makes me cringe.
mmm
Moderating:
Yeah, this is racist. And bad advice. Because of the wage differential between India and the US, and because a lot of Indians speak English, quite a lot of tech support, both legitimate and scammers, is done by Indians. If you freak out when you call tech support and get connected to someone with an Indian accent, you will miss out on a lot of decent tech support. The red flag isn’t that once she called, she reached someone with an accent. The red flag is that she got a pop-up urging her to call.
Please drop the tangent on Indian accents, and return to advice on fixing the problem and (non-racist) ways to avoid scams.