A number of customers have reported to us that they have been called by a what appears to be a call centre telling them that their computer is going to crash in 7 to 8 days or asking them if is running slower than it originally did.

firstly; it is only large corporate servers that are installed with monitoring tools that a 3rd party can manage, and this you have to setup and pay for, so the general user of laptops and pc's are hidden behind the router and virus checker firewall so Cannot be seen from the outside.

The call centre tactic is often to show you the event log, where you will almost always see errors, even on machine that are running well. They may ask you to right hand click on the My Computer Icon, and choose manage, so you can get to these logs.

The general advise is:- unless you have specifically requested a call from an IT company, just leave the phone off the hook (with some loud music playing into it) as this will increase their telephony bill, they will get bored and hang up. Or just hang up

These people are not just individuals trying to rip off cosumers, they have been specifically set up to rip off people, It will be only a matter of time before we see these reports on BBC's watchdog we feel