Advice needed please re. livechat scam.

yorkieorchid

I think I may have just fallen for a scam. I was trying to submit a gas Meter read to npower, and was struggling so when a live chat screen popped up i stupidly engaged in conversation with the helper and gave my email address date of birth and gas account number, then I received a phone call on my house phone from someone saying my computer had malaware on it. I immediately hung up, stopped chat, and am doing a full system scan. Is there anything else I should do? Can they do anything with the information I gave? Would appreciate any advice please. Thank you.

windup

Probably a coincidence, npower (0800 073 3000 ) have a live chat function on their website and people ring up random people every hour of the day pretending to be from Microsoft

Don't waste your time doing scans with your installed antivirus, if you had an infection, your scanner would have detected it anyway

yorkieorchid

Thank you windup, appreciate the advice.

amugofjava

Yea, I would say the same - a complete coincidence. There are a lot of these malware scams again, I must be getting one or two a week at the moment. Very annoying.

paddyrg

I would get (on our unlisted number) upto five 'Hello Ma'am I'm calling from windows about your computer' calls a day for a spell. Almost certainly raw coincidence

paddyrg

windup wrote: »

Don't waste your time doing scans with your installed antivirus, if you had an infection, your scanner would have detected it anyway

Totally agreed about the coincidence, but you cannot rely on heuristics to catch all problems. There's no harm and potentially a lot of value in find an occasional deep scan, as something that passed a heuristic scan a few months ago may show up on a deep pattern match with an up to date set of patterns.

I'd always encourage a full scan if anyone was feeling wary anyway - leave it running overnight maybe.

windup

Nothing to do with heuristics, a resident scanner uses the same scanning engine, if it happens to detect something during a full scan (rare), that something is not running and is therefore harmless - it will be detected if the user ever tries to run it.

Full scans with another product like malwarebytes are a more sensible use of electricity, as the engine and detection patterns are different.

Bigphil1474

Just dealt with some malware on my home PC, after 'somebody' down loaded a package from an untrusted website! (adsales related). I run Malwarebytes, Superspydetector, and a couple of others that were downloaded straight from the Mozilla website. I have full McAfee installed and it didn't pick up any of the issues that the other detector programmes did, despite the PC clearly being infected - web searches being redirected, sales banners appearing when they shouldn't have, and unusual requests for programmes to change my settings, and my firewall getting turned off, to name a few. After running all the scans, it detected 110 'issues' which were all removed and all okay now. I won't be relying on one security programme from now on.

windup

Perhaps your choice of resident antivirus protection is the thing that needs addressing, especially if you're paying for it, combined with being more careful what you click on and install - superspydetector?