The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's SCAMWatch has warned of a new remote access scam, with perpetrators impersonating Telstra or BigPond employees and requesting remote access to a mark's computer.
The fraudsters then report that a PC is infected with a virus and attempt to sell antivirus software or removal services.
Telstra has told the ACCC that it does not request credit card numbers over the phone in order to fix technical problems.
SCAMWatch has likened the con to the notorious Event Viewer scam and similar frauds, in which callers claim to be from Microsoft. The caller asks the victim to run Event Viewer; a piece of software included with Windows that maintains logs and monitors system events.
Earlier this year Microsoft admitted that it had been unable to shut down Indian-based telemarketing scam.