I have a feeling my aged mum has just been scammed. I am not sure how she has managed this but she bought a new HP printer which couldn’t get it to install so she went on to their website for support and some how was told by the HP technician on the chat window she needed to speak to a company called Sapphire Softech and they helpfully put her through to them. They proceeded to tell her that her PC was riddled with viruses, needed a new firewall etc…

I had set up McAfee on there for her when she bought it a year or so ago. Allegedly this was turned off.

The solution? She paid £250 for a life time support contract, it should have been £500 but the Government make a grant available to pensioners. She then left someone remote controlling her PC for “several hours”. Now her router has mysteriously stopped working.

I can find mixed reviews for this Sapphire Softech company online. Several people report a near identical experience.

This smells as fishy as a dolphin fart. I have got her to unplug her router from the wall so we can be 100% sure no one has access at the moment. I have asked her to call her CC company and bank in the AM to tell them that someone has had access. I will contact HP to see if there is any reason they would use a 3rd party to provide such invasive support because if this (and I doubt this) a real service, then the sell was extremely hard and unethical.

So given all this what the hell do I do next. I am back down south the weekend after next and will take a serious look around her PC then but what else do I recommend she does in the mean time?

They should call the bank fraud line immediately.
You might want to look at removing the drive and putting a new one in with a new windows image.

I’d also be changing any passwords (email etc) asap, assuming she has access from another device (phone?).

They should call the bank fraud line immediately.

already got her to do that but it will be in the AM.

I’d also be changing any passwords (email etc) asap, assuming she has access from another device (phone?).

likewise. god knows what mess she will cause but it needs to be done ASAFP

If she has internet banking then her bank accounts will have been cleared out, thats what the remote access is for. They got my dad a few weeks ago but they were claiming to be BT Openreach, they got almost £5k and they were still on the phone to him when I got there trying to get more

My dad’s laptop (similarly scammed) had a proxy running on it then the browser set to proxy to 127.0.0.1 so they could read everything he did online. Worth taking a look at that

She may not have actually called HP. There seems to be a lot of fake help sites that look like the real thing but have been manipulated to appear high in Google, especially if you search for a difficult problem