Scammers usually succeed in accomplishing their evil deeds by tricking unsuspecting individuals and making them believe that they are part of a legitimate company, in this case, Microsoft. One of their strategies is to call a person and tell his or her PC has been compromised by hackers and that they are there to help them.
Scammers tell the person all sort of technical nonsense and in the end tricks them into buying one of their bogus products.
However, what happens if a scammer tries to scam an ex-Microsoft employee? Not so good, for the scammer. That’s exactly what happened when a scammer was unfortunate enough to call a former senior developer at a company the scammer was pretending to work for.
To make matters worse for the scammer, the ex-Microsoft employee also runs his own YouTube channel called Barnacules Nerdgasm. He recorded the whole thing on video and posted it to his channel for the entire world to see.
Today will be a good day
It all started when Jerry Berg, a.k.a. Barnacules received a phone call very early in the morning from a man named Charlie.
Charlie told Jerry that he works for Microsoft and alerted him that his PC was infected by a virus called Code Red.
Jerry, a technically versed person that he was, knew immediately that Charlie was a scammer. He told Charlie that he had just woken up and he should call again after an hour. Jerry used that hour to set up a virtual machine for his computer so that the scammer couldn’t harm his PC. Jerry also has set up a video camera to record their whole conversation.
The so-called Code Red virus
After an hour, Charlie called again and proceeded to tell Jerry about the Code Red virus. The scammer’s story about the virus was so detailed that it can actually fool the average person, but not Jerry.
Charlie asked Jerry to download a program called Teqfly Support so that he can assist him remotely from his own PC. After downloading the program, Charlie explained that he saw Jerry’s PC was running slow and wasn’t receiving the proper updates due to the Code Red virus. Then Charlie went on and on about the virus, trying really hard to sell the fact that he was the real deal.
The scammer then introduced Jerry to a website called Teqfly which will supposedly help him protect his PC from viruses and malware with just a one-time activation fee of $199.99.
Payment time
Jerry proceeded to the payment page as instructed by Charlie for the activation fee and typed in a made-up credit card number. Upon clicking the “Pay Now” button, the website prompted an error, indicating that the card number doesn’t exist.
Charlie told Jerry to make sure that he was typing the credit card numbers accurately. After that, the scammer asked Jerry to do it all over again and refresh the page. Jerry couldn’t remember the card number he typed as he only made it up on the fly but proceeded to type a totally different number, and the scammer didn’t even notice it.
After trying several times, Jerry decided to let the scammer off the hook and told him that the credit card wasn’t real and that he knew the whole thing was a scam. Jerry even told the scammer to say hello to his thousands of subscribers on his YouTube channel.
The scammer was speechless and simply hung up the phone. You can see the whole video below.