Scammers pretending to be from HP Tech Support tried to access my HP Pavilion

[EmyUK]

Good morning HP team and community, I hope this is the appropriate thread to raise this flag. Yesterday I was almost scammed by a "HP Tech Support" engineer. I'm not sure how much aware you are of these scams and whether you can actually do something about it, but apparently they are very frequent and they are extremely disturbing, and I feel like I need to raise the awareness and ask for advice regarding this matter. Hopefully this will help other people as well, and they will know it's a scam if someone calls them in the future.

Yesterday I received a phone call, from a person claiming to be from HP Tech Support! They said there is a problem with our desktop PC, and that they are willing to help us fix the issue for free. As the HP Pavilion PC that we bought from Currys last year was running slightly slower lately, I thought this is indeed a genuine call, and I started following the advice of the "technician". Only when he directed me to a website and asked me to download a piece of software from an unofficial HP website, I realised that this might be a fraud/scam. The phone number that they called from is 01344450999, and you can find reports of recent scam calls online (just Google the number or on sites like scam numbers). Apparently they lock your PC and then ask for a ransom to unlock it, and I can imagine many people having sensitive information on their PCs and paying for the ransom 😞

I reported the number to Action Fraud, but is there anything else that we can do, to make sure we prevent them from causing stress and financial damage to people?

Many thanks,

Emy

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Hi:

While I don't work for or represent HP, this has been an ongoing issue and HP is definitely aware of it.

They issued this document regarding scammers and what precautions to take...one of which is that no one from HP will ever call you out of the blue, and tell you there is something wrong with your PC.

https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c05404707

[Mikago]

I don't know if it will help you, but you can query such phone numbers and I usually do theunknowncall.com/214-283-1316
  I use the service of this site, you can see the feedback of users.

Don't expect too much information from a free service, there is no information like name address but there is general information, like state city.

Take a look if you like.