I answered because I was expecting a call, the man had a strong Indian accent and claimed to be with Microsoft windows, and wanted to 'help me'. I told him I did not have a computer and he muttered something and hung up. I have never had caller ID only show 3 digits. any ideas?

VOIP.

Checking if you were home. And probably marked the timestamp. Ask around to the family if anyone else had unexpected and useless calls like this.

Maybe someone is making a timetable of when you guys are home.

I'm pretty sure this is just the "There is something wrong with your Windows computer" scam. I have received many of these and if I have time try to string him along until I get to the installing remote software part…the longer the better…the time you keep them on might save someone else that might fall for it.


Snopes

Oh! Wow, didn't know that...

They have rung me a couple of times.The first time I didn't realise what was going on and allowed them to go through their spiel but when they asked for remote access I finally twigged what it was about. The second time I just played with them. Baiting them seems to be a No1 sport on YT.

I've received calls like this before. The best was the guy calling me to tell my car warranty had expired but couldn't tell me what car it was for. Its sad that these types prey on people.

Force10 has it most likely. They call hoping to find older folks or those that they can scare to scam them into letting them run cleaner apps that always catch something--usually freeware like ccleaner and adaware--then bill them $400. Cancel the charge and then they hound you like its a legit fee.

They get people too. One of the guys here at work nearly got done a few years back, luckily he asked me if i could help him at all with his Windows problems first. He told me that someone from Windows had rung and then showed him all of the 'bad error codes' on his pc by directing him to the windows error reports. He said when he saw all of the errors he freaked out and thought his new expensive machine was in big trouble and he would have to do what this guy said and download some other program that he would have to pay for to fix it.

Dogs.

Have had a couple of these calls, one a couple of weeks ago > no number displayed.

He started asking some questions, so played along for a couple of minutes and then asked him if there was another person around who could speak clearer English because I was having trouble understanding him. He hung up.

True.

But what is even sadder is that they prey on elderly folks who don't know any better too.

These call centers are legitimate drone targets IMO.

I mean HELLO, we are being HACKED constantly from about 3 major places in the world. Can't we just shut them off?

The phone stuff is easy if you have your wits about you, but if they are stealing your personal financial info, trying to hack into everything you depend on to live....you'd kinda hope your government would step up and say enough is enough!

Unfortunately my father-in-law fell for this a couple of years ago. He is in his 80's and I feel these despicable people do prey on the elderly who maybe aren't that technology wise and are a generation that still have a degree of trust which is preyed upon and exploited.
He had had some connection issues earlier that day which was actually an exchange problem and it was just a coincidence that he should be contacted by these scammers.
His wife after 3 hours of him dealing with them and him giving both credit and debit details and getting more agitated realised something was amiss and contacted me. I told them to turn off and unplug everything immediately and then (luckily with the help of my tech-savvy sons) there followed a tedious clean up, ditching of router and cancelling all cards etc.
Apart from all the inconvenience and cost (though we were able to cancel the £600 credit card payments) it had a profound effect on him, blaming himself for falling for it and being 'a silly old fool' and realising he was losing control of things and made him fall into a deep depression.

That's a terrible thing to have happened to your father-in-law BD-123.Just how these companies are allowed to continue is beyond me.

I'm eagerly awaiting my next scam call,be it 'Microsoft support' or PPI or whatever.They just usually end up listening to me play whatever game I have running at the time until they hang up.

They phone all the time, I think. I'm never home,
and they don't leave messages on the machine, but
I'm pretty sure it's them, as on occasion I've been
around and answered. When it is one of them, I begin
a conversation with them, and start asking them about
how they feel about being a bottom rung member of a
criminal organization that attempts to defraud little
old ladies. I ask them what they think this is doing
for their karma. About then they usually hang up. Some
of them practise their english language profanity as
they do so. I laugh.

That's why I don't answer the phone from numbers I don't recognize anymore. Ever.
I let them go to the machine and I call back. Now if they leave no message, it can't have been too important, could it?



The Jedi Master