Anyone heard of Peepaltri?

[SickwithFury]

I've just had a call from this company, claiming that they were Windows affiliated, and showed me (remotely - yes, how stupid am I [angry) how many virus's I have on my laptop. Call went on and on, before they asked me for a flat payment of £95 for their technicians to clean my laptop up.

Guy was so insistent that I finally had to put down the phone and quickly force a shut down (I could see that they still had remote access). I'm on DH's laptop now but am fearful that I've let them 'in'. Thankfully, I didn't pass with any credit details.

Help!

It's a scam I'm afraid. You'll need to properly scan/clean the laptop (a good antivirus program and a malware detector at the very least; download them on your DH's laptop and transfer them to yours via USB drive with yours disconnected from the 'net, then run them and see what they turn up - malwarebytes is a good one for malware, avg or avast! will do for antivirus), and turn off remote access before you put it back on the net. You will also need to change any sensitive passwords just in case, especially if you use the same password/username combo in more than one place.

The evidence of viruses that they claim to have found is often entirely bogus. Did they get you to start eventvwr and then count the number of messages that were marked with a red exclamation mark? That's what these scammers usually do. Such "errors" are usually entirely ordinary messages from different parts of Windows doing their usual stuff and can be entirely safely ignored. For example, my laptop produces a number of "errors" when its network port isn't connected to anything even though I might be using a wireless network connection.

As Naoko says, run malwarebytes to ensure they haven't left anything nasty behind and change your passwords. If you get any similar calls again, tell them that you know they're lying scammers and to bugger off.

Blimey, the sheer gall of these people astound me. They were SO insistent about getting my Paypal details, even remotely took me to the page for me to start entering any details. I'm guessing they would have nabbed my paypal info and abused that?

Can I report this to anyone?

Naoko thanks, how do I turn off remote access to my laptop?

What version of Windows are you running? I'll see if I can find you some nice clear instructions on how to do it :)

Windows 7, Naoko. Thank you.

My laptop IS running slow and I fell for this, hook and line (but thankfully not Sinker).

Have posted this on another forum I'm on and someone linked me a Guardian Article from July last year, detailing exactly everything I've said.

Right, I had to look that up for you because I've not done before in 7, but the instructions I found are as follows:

1. In Control Panel, click System And Security, and then click System.
2. On the System page, click Remote Settings in the left pane. This opens the System Properties dialog box to the Remote tab.
3. To disable Remote Desktop, select Don?t Allow Connections To This Com¬puter, and then click OK.

Hope that helps :)

Thanks Naoko.
Am going to do it this evening.