Hi, hope this is the right board for this question.
Chatting to my mum recently she mentioned that she'd paid some company £120 to get "business calls" stopped and she felt a bit silly about it. I tried to get more detail but her memory isn't great and she was obviously embarrassed about being taken for a ride. Unfortunately she finds it difficult to say no to cold callers and seems to be on a sucker list so she gets loads of them.
It seems though that whoever called her up and took her money got her to start up her laptop - she wasn't sure what they did but she said she was on the phone/laptop for about 2 hours. She said they've rung since but she put the phone down on them and has stopped using her laptop. I don't think they were claiming to be from Microsoft in this instance but I can't believe it was anything bona fide.
She's away for a few days so I offered to try and sort the laptop out. I'm thinking of taking it to a computer repair shop locally tomorrow to get it scanned for malware etc, but I wondered if there was anything I could do myself. I'm not very technical but wondered if it would be worth starting it up to see if there's anything obviously wrong. But I'm a bit scared I might make it worse.
Can anyone help?