Are you aware of scammers at tomtommapupdate.us?

How do you allow this to happen? They phoned me immediately. I was very suspicious and they wanted to access my computer via logmein.com
Absolutely scammers

Hi folks,

Spent most of the day yesterday dealing with the fallout with one of these scams. My father is a pensioner but still drives a lorry to earn pennies. He relies on his professional TomTom to get himself around the country. Last week, his live traffic updates stopped working, despite him thinking he had lifetime traffic updates (which he does). He then went onto TomTom's webpage and bought a random £40 update package, which didn't work as it sounds like it wasn't for his device. So he bought another!!! This one for £30. When that one also didn't work, he Googled TomTom updates and clicked the first link. That is where his troubles began.

From what I can tell, he then went through their live chat option, where they told him his device was corrupted and that he had 2 options. 1) to purchase a new £400 device or 2) to pay £270 for a "technician" to call him and reconfigure his device. He mentioned that he'd already spent £70 the day before on failed update packages, so they told him "they could see that so just pay the £200 difference for the device reconfiguration". This is what he did.

Luckily for him, he paid this by bank transfer, but that didn't stop the scammer from then asking him for his credit card details. My father was intelligent enough at this point to question why they need that when he'd already made payment, to which they retorted "why, don't you trust us"???!!! They went on to say it was so they could create an account for my father, but luckily he told them he wasn't interested in an account and that was that.

An hour or two later, somebody did indeed call him to gain access to his pc. He duly went through with it. The "technician" made comments during the process as he went through his personal files, including complimenting my father on the car he drove, and offering advice on his choice of antivirus and offering a further costly package to update that for him! He then clicked some buttons and told my father it was fixed and should now work correctly.

Come Monday morning, in our morning chat, my father was telling me of the encounter. I only got halfway through before I told him to block his cards and brace himself for bad news. The following day I went to see him and sure enough, his PC was bricked. I can only imagine that the "technician" (at this point I wish to call him by some very insensitive names) deleted his master boot record, thus eliminating the possibility of him tracing his steps through his history. Or maybe its because they've been calling his mobile for the past two days to offer more "tech support" to his PC. Luckily for my father, the PC was handbuilt by me last year and was due an upgrade anyway, so a quick format of the drives and a quick reinstall and he was on his way. The bank has been notified, a freeze has been put on the bank account (which the bank can see contains just my fathers £200) and the bank seem able to get it back. I have a much wiser father who is now able to use a password manager and is more clued up when it comes to giving details out online. His email address has been changed and I will look to change his mobile number today.

And yes, his device didn't need an upgrade, I believe it just needed a factory reset. Just as a precaution I did this anyway, just incase.

So if anybody can please look into this and put pressure onto the relevent authorities, it'd be appreciated. It's a shame that most people won't even read this until AFTER a similar occurrence.

Stay safe folks... H

Thanks Doug,

Unfortunately I have completely reinstalled his PC and TBH I just cannot bring myself to trawl through his data using a data recovery tool like Ease US. I spoke with TomTom this morning and they have confirmed the original £70 transactions were indeed via them, so at least he will get that back as well. I've emailed Action Fraud to let them know of the issue.

The emails are coming from a company claiming to be "Accurate Resolution Services" in Birmingham UK. I can see from Companies House that the company was setup in September last year, so is unlikely to be genuine. Or it may be just unfortunate that the scammers have chosen to use their company name and have downloaded their logo for use on their email headers. Either way, as a precaution, they've had a negative Google review this morning from me in the hope somebody might see it and think twice before dealing with them.

Oh, and since writing the above post, the scammers have called him around 6 times yesterday and emailed 6 times since yesterday morning. Each time offering a "refund", no doubt to discuss how their services can be used to fix his computer...

TomTom themselves were helpful this morning. It turns out his SN didn't have lifetime speed cams or traffic updates after all. So we've agreed to update his camera's and purchase a TMC traffic receiver cable to enable his traffic services.

I guess we all learn from our mistakes, but this one was a very useful lesson for us... it might not cost him anything but a little time.

Thanks again

H

I ran into this scam today. I keep a spare Tomtom VIA in my wife's car and deceided to update it using MyDrive. After 2 days of failing to upgrade because it timed out and said the server was busy, try again; I tried the on line help where I was asked a few questions and then told it was a problem with my computer. I was gived a link to download some software and then told a computer expert would call me. It soon became apparent that this person had no interest in Tomtom and wanted to modify my computer. It was fairly obvious that he was a scammer following a standard routine.
What puzzles me is how my Tomtom MyDrive connected me to the scammers rather than with TomTom assistance. The number the Scammer called from was 02039504642.

Crikey - that number has been at it for a while now!

https://who-called.co.uk/Number/02039504642