You open your computer one morning and you have a standard-looking pop-up from Microsoft telling you your computer needs support and has been hacked. It looks exactly like every sort of warning you’ve seen before.
This is what happened to a North Dakota resident, who wishes to remain anonymous and unknowingly fell victim to a sophisticated cyber scam. This notification came at the end of November and was the beginning of a month-long nightmare.
“I first tried to close the pop-up and it locked everything on my computer,” Anonymous said, “Turning my computer off didn’t make it disappear either. The pop-up instructed me to call a number for assistance and because one of my friends had recently suffered a situation with identity theft, out of panic, I called the number.”
On the other end of the phone was a very sympathetic man, who was trying to do everything possible to help the North Dakota victim get the computer unhacked.
“He told me that Microsoft offers security features that will protect me in the future that he could install, so I let him login to my laptop,” Anonymous said. “That was a big mistake.”