I received two email notifications informing me that they automatically renewed my Norton Security Protection and have charged my credit card for $207.70 and if I wanted to cancel and ask for a refund to call 1-408-915-5052. I was so stressed out. I didn’t remember signing up for Norton and when I went to their site, it was hard to find the link nor a customer hotline.
I dialed the number given in the email. It took like 40 minutes and several tries before someone answered.
Clearly, this was not a standard customer service hotline. He never mentioned the name Norton to greet callers. The line was very choppy and I had to call several times to continue my request of canceling this and asking for a refund. The guy has a very thick Indian accent. He said yes he will refund but it will take a long time, then there was silence.
I called again after a day, another Indian guy answered. I asked where their office is, he said Texas.
The line was cut, I dialed again. Another Indian guy answered who sounded uninterested in my call. None of these fellows ever mentioned Norton. They all have very thick accents and when I asked this third guy where he is located he said California. When I asked why the other fellow said they are in Texas, he said they have offices all over the world. When I said “you are in India now”, he hung up the phone.
I called several times and no one wanted to pick up my call. When finally a guy who spoke better English answered after yawning, he too hung up the phone when I started asking too many questions.
I called again and this time the guy with a thick Indian accent told me to open my laptop and go to another site. I told him why would I do that? They should just refund my money and cancel whatever Norton subscription they were talking about. He said he is asking me to go to that website so that their technical guy can remove all the programs that they installed on my computer. He said he is a finance guy and not a technical guy. I told him I don’t need a tech guy, they should be able to cancel any subscription in a push of a single button, the same way when I subscribed to Norton. I told him there are many scammers and hackers and I don’t want to go to another site. He hung up on me.
I think these criminals are fishing. They would ask unsuspecting victims to go to another site and to follow their programming instructions until the owner of the computer has transferred all his computer’s data. Either the bad guys would use those data to steal bank accounts, credit cards, whatever, or they will hostage the owner to give them money to return the stolen data.
It is safe to assume that thousands of people have been victimized by many scams like this. Beware of different kinds of modus operandi. Criminals can steal data in seconds.
I saw on the news about this guy who lost almost all of his savings to online scammers. One morning he received a call from a guy who said he is from Bank of America. According to the guy, they suspect that his bank account had been hacked so the bank needs verification so they could protect his account. He followed the guy’s instructions and he gave his username, passwords, etc. He was asked to open a new account and to transfer his funds there to keep it safe from hackers. He followed the guy’s instructions and transferred all of his savings to that new bank account.
It was too late for him to realize he was scammed. Luckily, Bank of America returned all the money stolen from him after they had conducted a thorough investigation and was able to ascertain that the client was indeed scammed.
