New Telephone Scam?

[MsProudSooner]

I've gotten a couple of phone calls recently where the person (in heavily accented English) said they were calling from Microsoft and that my computer was 'sending error messages' or something like that. One time the call disconnected and the second time I was walking out the door so I don't know what their ultimate pitch was. The caller ID didn't have a name. It just listed a phone number in the 510 area code. You could hear lots of people talking in the background.

Has anyone else heard of phone calls like this?

[MountainOkie]

I got this call. I told the woman point blank that I knew she was lying. Then I recommended she take the rest of the day off to re-examine her path in life.

The accent sounded oriental.

[yermom]

sounds legit.

lol

[badger]

As you've all already said, it's a scam designed to either just get money, or to install crap on your computer that finds your personal and financial info to ID theft.

I actually wondered if this was concerning this booth I've seen on a street corner near where I live -- FREE CELL PHONES! It's been appearing since baby badger was born. Apparently when it first showed up, it had a HUGE line for it. Since then, there's still been people out there, but not as many.

Apparently it's fairly legit if you go through the FCC. Here's something one of the TV stations did on it:
http://www.fox23.com/news/local/story/Free-Cell-phones-too-good-to-be-true/G8J5GW6wTkqMBqNF5cqpsQ.cspx

Of course, some people are abusing the program and getting more than one free phone. Whoops.