This is the second time I have received a phone call from so called 'tech support', the first was from 'Microsoft' the second from 'Semantic'. This time the guy said that he was from Semantic, who apparently has taken over tech support for Microsoft (flag number one). Now keep in mind after the first phone call, I was not nice to this guy, so why he stayed on the line as long as he did I do not know. Anyway he made me go to the command prompt (cmd) and look up assoc. He then listed this CLSID (more later) that matched the one I had to confirm that he has a ‘unique’ id for my system. He said that in order to fix the problem I would need to get remote assistance from them.

This is a line you should never, ever cross unless you have physically called whoever you are talking to. Your operating system has safeguards in place that basically eliminates someone forcibly remoting into your computer, but if you allow them access the operating system assumes that you trust and know who you are talking to. The whole time I said I was trying to view this company he was insisting I go to this website, DO NOT do this either as scripts can be run in the background to compromise your system.

On the note of the CLSID, I made the guy wait while I typed it into the search bar, I guess they assume that no one would want to spend the time to do this (not I) and I got numerous articles about a call scam with the same apparently unique CLSID to my computer, not so unique am I. At this point he hung up on me after I quoted the text.

The other scam involved Event Viewer, a tool built in to Vista and Windows 7 to troubleshoot errors which pretty much logs everything, including those times when Firefox freezes because you have 25 tabs open at once. So don’t believe a word of this either, and the second they ask to remote in tell them to shove it.

That CLSID btw, is .zfsendtotarget=CLSID\{888DCA60-FC0A-11CF-8F0F-00C04FD7D062}. Yes, he waited while I typed that, to my surprise. Feel free to copy paste this ID into the search and read some of the articles and spread the word.