IT Scams: The stuff you won't believe!

I'm starting a new thread dedicated to the absolute charlatans running around the IT services industry, using this particular "expert" as my primary case study:

"Emergency PC Service"

I happened to stumble upon this video on YouTube, and honestly, there's an entire collection of these gems from the same guy if you need some light reading; what makes it truly painful is seeing this stuff aired on NBC. 😂

Some of his finest moments include:
"All I have to do is suspect a virus, which involves certain human qualities that simply can't be programmed into any antivirus software."
"I don't know a word of Chinese, but I used to know everything."
😁

Now, my esteemed colleague Pavel, you have to understand that this concept predates even the most ancient biblical prophets.

Man, it's old school, but I always have a soft spot for it 😁

Looks like I’m officially from the era of 5.25" floppies... just like this hardware 😁

Seriously though, how many of us old-timers are actually hanging around here? 😁😵😵

It’s honestly impressive how some businesses manage to stay afloat for over twenty years without ever truly evolving, which means those old-school tricks like troubleshooting formatting errors or running a defragmenter are still somehow considered valid solutions today. 😁

Dennis Richardson4 said:I mean, seriously, how many of us are actually this old? 😁😵 😵

Man, there are plenty of us out there! 👍

And honestly, regarding his point about those Chinese Windows versions... if you recall back in the 90s, we used to get all kinds of language-specific CDs sent right to our doorsteps as part of our MSDN subscriptions, and I can still vividly picture that massive stack of discs. I even remember once mentioning that I was going to desperately need a Bulgarian NT40 workstation at some point, and I really do need it 😁

wearymason4 said:It looks like they’ve been around since the days of 5.25" floppies... just like me. 😁

Haha, now that was real storage right there. You couldn't just lose them as easily as a thumb drive, and honestly, you felt like a total genius whenever you'd casually thud a stack of them onto the table during morning coffee at Starbucks. 😁
I remember playing a few classics off those disks, like those old stripping poker games and 😂Boom! Tetris for Jonas!!

Personally, I found things much more convenient back when the 3.5'' drives first hit the scene; I could just pull one out of my shirt pocket looking as smooth as Hugh Hefner...🙂

So, one time a buddy of mine asked if I could help him figure out how to install this game from some old floppies. I told him, "Just bring them along, we'll meet up later and I'll try it on my rig." When we finally linked up, the guy pulls out a 5.25" floppy, folded up twice into quarters just so he could shove it into the little top pocket of his denim jacket...

And then there was this other legend from work. Back in the early nineties, he’d head over to the accounting department at a local factory every time they had to process payroll—man, inflation back then was absolutely brutal—to help them out. He’d jump into their system and manually add an extra digit to the input mask for the amounts being entered (I think he mentioned it was running on COBOL?).
He’d pack everything up in a folder, tucked away with two 8" disks inside.

Back in the mid-90s, this was actually cutting-edge tech—we were looking at 120 MB packed into a standard 3.5" drive (the floptical LS-120):

Before that, we had the Zip drive, right up until they started getting that dreaded "click of death."