Senior Scam

          I’m not proud of myself for staying on the phone for five full minutes yesterday, struggling to understand that out-sourced woman’s voice.  I should have suspected the scam right away.  But here are my excuses, four factors working against me:  First off, she knew my name – “Is this Aye-DEET?”
          ·        And these days any sort of accent throws me, so I was busy being apologetic  “sorry, it’s not your fault, but could you speak more slowly…what did you say…could you please repeat that?”

·        Also, it develops that I’m particularly vulnerable because, I learned later, the whole operation is designed to snare older victims.

·        And having just struggled with a new computer, I was unusually receptive to such words as I could make out…“Tech department of Microsoft… we are receiving error reports from your computer…I can get you a better connection…are you sitting at your computer... I’ll tell you what to do.”

Fortunately, I gave up at that point and hung up in frustration.  I like to think I would have quit even if I was hearing clearly, before she directed me to give her my credit card number and download some nasty stuff, and even to give her control of my computer altogether.  Instead, I emailed son Dov, who had set up this new computer when he was here over the holidays, and he did some googling.

So just in case you hear from her, be advised that Microsoft has issued a statement that says – among other things – that they don’t keep track of where error messages come from.  Their tech department does not call people.  Etc etc.

I publish this in hopes of reaching my original intended audience -- folks old enough to know better. 

It's my Public Service Announcement.