I think the message has gotten across to most people by now that a company like Microsoft, Apple, or Amazon will never call you with a problem. These are always scams, calling you to alert you to some problem, whether it is a virus or an expiring account, or whatever. After convincing you that there is a problem, they will ask for money to fix it. This is usually the risk – getting your money – rather than actually infecting your computer, but sometimes it’s both. Bottom line: hang up on them.
I was recently alerted to a new scam, which is actually the above in reverse. One of my clients needed some help from Amazon customer service, and they googled for that online and called the resulting number. The “Amazon employee” proceeded to throw lots of alarming information at my client, offering to hook them up with companies that could fix the problem, for somewhere between $300 and $500. Of course, the client was told that they weren’t supposed to contact those companies directly – they would be connected by the rep because they had a special relationship with these companies. This should, and did, raise eyebrows. The fake rep offered a name and an employee number which was later confirmed to be as fake as he was. Luckily my client hung up and called me first.
So what went wrong here? Always start with the official, home website (in this case www.amazon.com) when looking for contact info for any major tech company. What scammers are doing are posting their own phone numbers on the web with the search parameters that will match “Amazon Customer Service”, so a google search will bring up these fake numbers.