Avoid printer support scam sites

Hi all, well I hadn't planned to write this month, but there's a particular scourge on the internet that has caught out at least 4 of my clients over the past 12 months. The scenario is: you go looking for advice on how to install your printer, since you're confused, and you get served up an ad or a very convincing website by a google or bing search which looks and feels like an official website for the printer brand you're trying to install. Of course it's not. You fill out a form, the people on the website call you and tell you the reason you can't install your printer is because your computer's been compromised ie. hacked, somehow.

They ask for money (quite a lot) to perform the fix and are very convincing. Hopefully you don't give them your credit card details. Even if you don't, they will ask you to perform a bunch of steps to let them into the computer. From there they can (a) set up your printer (b) pretend to be fixing things while installing spyware and malware or (c) steal your website login details. You can see the area this lands you in.

If you're not down on these clowns they'll take your money, and then take more. At any rate, here's what you should do if something like this happens to you.

1. Hang up and block the number.
2. If they ask for credit card details, don't give them. If you have, ask your bank to cancel the card and reverse transactions, explain you've been scammed.
3. Don't give them access to your computer. If you have, shut down your computer immediately - do not turn it back on again. And take it into a computer professional to get your data backed up, a clean install of the OS installed, and your data and programs put back on. You can read some of my previous articles to see why such extreme measures are necessary, but in a nutshell, you don't know what they've installed, and antivirus software doesn't always catch everything.

For how to differentiate a fake support website for a brand from a real one, a real one will Always be within the brand's official website ie. epson.com for epson, trademe.co.nz for trademe and so on. A real support website will be, for example, microsoft.com (for microsoft), then a forward slash ('/'), then another series of letters and/or numbers. A fake one might be something like www.realsupport.com/microsoft, or microsoft.talk.com, or something like that. Just having the name in the link is not enough, it has to be last thing in the link before the type identifier (.com, .net, .co.nz etc) and before the backslash.

So that's it. That's how you avoid or mitigate against this sort of thing. Good luck.

- written entirely by Matt Bentley