A couple days ago Ted received the second of two phone calls from a strange six-digit number. This was obviously going to be a totally legitimate and very important call, so he answered. A representative from “Windows” was calling him about some errors on his computer -- its extra alarming when your Mac is sending errors to Windows, so it's good thing they called! There was a quick exchange in which the rep asked Ted to enter a few commands, the only important detail from this point on: regardless of Ted’s fake descriptions of what was happening onscreen, the response was always he needed to send money to fix the errors.

It made for a good laugh here in the office, but led us to the question of why would anyone answer a call from a strange number and then send the person on the other end of the line money? People don’t really do that, do they? There’s the recent story of Andy Welch giving his card and PIN (and ultimately a couple thousand dollars) to fraudsters who were calling him from “Visa Card Services.” We also came across Nate Anderson’s experience with the same scam call Ted received. As it turns out there’s stories of this happening as far back as 2009.

In the case of Mr. Welch, he seemed to do everything right by hanging up and calling the number on the back of his credit card. With the Windows scam on the other hand, you can probably think of at least a couple people you know who would easily fall for this one, and as long people keep falling for it, phones will keep ringing. So be smart and be skeptical, and if you see your computer owning parents/grandparents/uncle this weekend, tell them to do the same!