We have recently been having some problems with our DSL line so when my wife passed me the phone and said it was the BT Engineer I wasn’t surprised.  What happened next did frighten me.

A man with a rather smart sounding Asian accent introduced himself and said he was from “BT Global” about the router issue. OK said I, expecting to be given a time for the “Openreach” Engineer to arrive.

So I was mildly surprised when he asked me to get in front of the PC and thought I’d play along for a bit.

“Sir can you press the Windows Key and R now type cmd in the box that appears.”

“You should have a black box come up on the screen. Can you type assoc in it for me there will be lots of writing but about 2 or 3 lines from the bottom will be your router address”

Well that rang alarm bells what have file associations got to do with networking? Lets play along a little further.

“I can’t see anything obvious”, I replied.

“Sir about 2 or three lines from the bottom there should be a long 16 character string that’s your router address”

“No I still can’t see anything”, I replied.

“Oh well sir I can do it for you” he replied.

“Can you Press The Windows Key and R again for me and type in LogMeIn123.com you will need the six digit code that came with your router do you have that Sir”

“Yes”, I replied lying through my back teeth.

Now we end up at the following very legitimate remote support site.

“OK Sir Can you enter the following code 123456”

Well at this point I start calling him a scammer and asking what my Service_ID is he doesn’t have a clue and I hang up.

The scary thing is if it were my Mom she would have probably put the code in and given unfettered remote access to the so called BT engineer Who could then load any malware they desire on the machine and hold the  victim to ransom.  Unfortunately the number was withheld so I couldn’t report further.

Remember a real BT engineer can get into your router from their side so there should be no call for a legitimate engineer to do this.