I helped three Mac owners today; in Woodbridge, Melton and Ufford. While most of my time is spent helping people with Windows PCs, I seem to be providing a lot more Mac support these days.
After recovering a Windows Vista laptop this morning (the victim of the Nerd Support Group described in my last blog post) I walked to my next customer in Woodbridge. I have helped them many times with their iMac and iPhones. Today I set up file sharing between their Mac and PC, while also creating a VAT calculation spreadsheet for use in their business.
After a quick lunch, I went to my next customer in Melton with a very old iMac. He needed help with his printer and managing the files on his iMac. While there I made it easier for him to use and answered a lot of questions he’d been saving for me.
My last customer of the day had called in a panic this morning, as her MacBook could not connect to their wireless router. Within 15 minutes of arriving in Ufford, I had her back online and very relieved.
So, while I have no official training on Macs and am not a qualified Mac technician, you can see I am providing a lot of solutions for Mac users in the Woodbridge area.
Have you heard of the latest scam to hit computer users? I read about it last week and already one of my customers has been caught out.
She recieved a phone call, completely out of the blue, from a ‘computer support company’ claiming to have detected problems with her computer. This caller managed to talk her into letting him take control of her computer remotely to ‘solve’ her ‘problems’. She was asked for her credit card details and charged over £180.
If this wasn’t bad enough, whatever the person did has resulted in her not being able to connect to the internet since. She called me to help get her back online, still unaware she had been duped. I had to break the bad news to her over the phone and tell her to inform her credit card company immediately – now she knows fraudsters have her details. As well as having to deal with that, she now has to pay for me to come out and solve real problems, caused by this fraudster.
There has been a rising number of such scams in recent months. If you get a call out of the blue, offering to fix problems with your computer over the phone, don’t believe a word! If you are unsure, take names, numbers and say you will call back – but don’t go any further until you’ve had time to ask me about it or research the company online.