Call about CA Root certificate

Rosmerta

Advise on legitimacy!
I've just had a long call from a company claiming to be the technical support arm of Microsoft; they "proved" they where legitimate by giving me and then showing me how my computer licence number.
I seem to have a slow computer which is sending lots of unsolicited messages, they showed me via "prefetch" that alot of my microsoft system programs where idenified as 'stopped'
Then they showed me that the "CA Root Agency" certificate was not trusted on my computer and that I would need to make a purchase to register this, which also has antivirus and firewall protection - and said it would be £116 for a 3 year certificate.
Does this sound legit to you, is this something I can do for free? They annoyed me as they were so insistent but I said I wanted to think about it before making a high value purchase.
Any thoughts/comments welcomed!

PS I asked for their number to call back, but they said they would call me - and when a did 1471 after the call the number 00000 came up..!

JJ_Egan

Scam, steer clear .
Prefetch is a way of confusing you .

ConsumerWizkid

Make no mistake. Microsoft will never call you to help you speed up your computer.

This is definitely a scam.

bod1467

It's just a variation on the "Look at all the issues in your Event log" scam.

Rosmerta

Thank you all!
I am normal very skeptical and bin anything that I don't recognise but was taken in a bit by this as they showed me my computer's own id!
Thanks for the advise - I'll tell them where to go when they call me again!

enfield_freddy

which ID did they show you?

esuhl

Rosmerta wrote: »

... they showed me my computer's own id!

Your computer doesn't have a universally-recognised ID.

NiftyDigits

and clean up your OS. There are people here who can help you with that.

googler

enfield_freddy wrote: »

which ID did they show you?

Seconded- which ID, and how did they 'show' it?

bod1467

They'll have shown them the ID from the certificate - i.e. OP followed their instructions and found their own certificates?

I hope OP didn't give them remote control of his PC! :eek:

Rosmerta

They quoted a 36 digit number, then asked me to run cmd and at the end, this number was identical to that they quoted - they said that only Microsoft and I would know this computer ID number..!
I feel pretty stupid because it way beyond my knowledge base - and how would I clean up my OS (is that operating system?)
I think perhaps part of this scam is that I'm on XP (I think) and therefore don't have access to any updates from Microsoft defender etc