I own a Dell Laptop and I've experienced this same phone call at least a dozen times. Its always someone with a thick indian accent as well. They tell me my co

I own a Dell Laptop and I've experienced this same phone call at least a dozen times. Its always someone with a thick indian accent as well. They tell me my computer is compromised. It happened most frequently during news of Meltdown and Spectre, probably hoping to use predatory tactics on people who don't know any better. I asked them to validate the information. They had my serial tag number, my purchase date, the model, my address, my fullname last name, etc. I bought this unit from bestbuy, I don't ever actually remember entering this information in. It might have been the dell bloatware installed on the PC, or information bestbuy gave to dell. This was 2013, I've gotten over dozens of phone calls since then I remember distinctly playing the con-man and really seeing how much information they wanted. It was always "Sir, let me help you fix your computer its urgent your computer is h4ck3d". I never gave them access to my computer, but I did do one screensharing session out of sheer curiosity. He would have a convincing story about telling me to go to the event manager, point at some random unrelated item, tell me how come I've never noticed that before and spin a convincing story about my computer being compromised. He would have me run some basic terminal commands, I can't recall which ones, but it involved things like ipconfig among other things. Then we would go on some DNS tracing tools online, some were actually legitimate I checked the domain name on my other computer while this session was live. I pretended to be gullible and naive so he would take the bait. I was brought to some scam site. I can't remember anymore what it was. But it was like a marketing ad agency, except it was clearly poorly designed with UX clearly designed by someone overseas (with proper ingrammer and such), and they sold prepaid hourly packages for "tech support" whatever that meant. Probably, it was actual overly priced tech support with blackmailing mixed on the side, and selling it to black data markets for creditcard theft. I didn't risk it venturing further I have another whole story unrelated to this as well from company checks scams & Nigerian Princes that I personally experienced I just ask them one simple question. Please email me an official confirmation via "yourname@dell.com" to validate everything stated on this phonecall. They never did. That's how I validate all phony calls, but normally I just hang up and look for the direct number on the official dell website. I strongly considered running a Lenny anti-telemarketing chatbot, but I ended up just installing an app called "Should I answer?" to determine legitimacy of calls. Now I just straight don't answer calls I don't recognize anymore, I always make an effort to add contact information of people I care about. Calls can be spoofed for local numbers, and I have a voicemail. If it was important, a voicemail would be left. Controversally, I find the data market to be interesting. I keep track of which companies have sold my data where, via something akin to honeypots using specific appended email addresses. There's a good reddit article here https://www.reddit.com/r/LifeProTips/comments/45k8f7/lpt_when_providing_your_email_to_other_sites/ https://www.reddit.com/r/LifeProTips/comments/45k8f7/lpt_whe... , it doesn't work all the time but I have different email addresses for different purposes now.