I was a stockbroker at a popular online brokerage. In order to save money, the brokers in the branch offices were made into the frontline tech support for customers. Needless to say, we weren’t trained beyond a “really helpful” wiki on our corporate intranet. 99% of the calls were easy “reinstall java” or “clear your cache” type calls with the 1% falling into ugly thing that involved checking IP addresses, log ins, etc.
One of the 1% calls I got was from an elderly man. He called up and asked to speak to tech support. He needed a series of daytrades that day “busted” which means we as a company would eat his losses. He proceeds to tell me that they were placed due to a virus that was in his mouse. He actually argued with me that the virus in his mouse was filling out the web order forms and doing the buying and selling. Mind you, it only was doing the bad ones, none of the good ones, he did those. I escalated the call to the help desk and the next thing I know the man is in my office holding his mouse telling me that tech support requested that he bring his mouse in for inspection.
It wasn’t even a USB mouse. It was an ancient serial mouse. We “examined” it for a couple days and stated that we could find no evidence of the virus. We were nice enough to include a free copy of anti-virus software as a courtesy. Guess who got to go to the customers house to install it?
Infected mouse, never hear that one before. -Scott
My mom swears the mouse gave her computer a virus and the “Magic Box hates her”
While I do not doubt for a moment this particular customer was, in fact, a bozo trying to blame his bad decisions on someone else’s bank account, it should be noted that distributing a virus by way of a (USB) mouse has been demonstrated.
I used to work for a futures trading company. One of our customers called in and said that his cat walked across his keyboard, stepped on a few keys placed a trade for him.
Was the customer a Mr Dexter Douglas by any chance? And the cat, Mr Chubbikins?