Your Computer is sending

Oggy - this is what I love about being a Mac user [ applies to Linux folk as well ].

When they say our PC is having problems and we are Windows users we can sit back and laugh at them

Good point Oggy. That's true of bel-me-niet too, only for Dutch companies.

But not many fraudsters speak Dutch so they probably won't try too hard here, at least not with any success.
There have been a few who've tried with bank info, either by phone or e-mail. Incredibly some, seemingly intelligent, people fall for it.

I've just warned my 84 year old mum about this scam. She doesn't even have a computer but could be fooled into buying whatever nonsense it is anyway. :

Actually I've just thought if anyone gets one of these calls you should ask "Which computer" and then list of 10 different units and see what they say.

The "your computer is running slow" scam has been around for nearly 2 years now.

It is well documented on the computer forums I am a member of.

They ask you to boot up your computer and search for certain files, which are in fact legitimate windows files and they try to tell you these are a virus/spyware/malware etc.

They then go on to say that if you pay them 'X' amount of £'s they'll clean your computer up.

I've heard that constantly pressing the hash ( # ) key on your telephone keypad messes them up but how true this is I don't know.

Regards, Chris.

Well, some legitimate automated menus use the hash key as "enter", I know mobile phone top-up vouchers tend to ask you to enter the code then press hash to confirm it. Could be that it causes their autodialer to go slightly nuts as it's getting inputs it hasn't been programmed to handle?