Yesterday I had an error on my PC where the anti-virus program crashed just after start up. The advice – to reboot – just led to another crash. Fortunately something very similar had happened about 20 months previously and I  managed to resolve it this time by deleting three files, as I had done before.

This morning I had a call from an international number. A woman told me she was from the Windows Support Centre and had I been having problems with my computer? They had received error messages.

“Why yes”, I said, thinking of the previous day’s problem “I have been getting the message TPSrv.exe has requested the runtime to terminate it in an unusual way.”

She then terminated the phone call in the usual way.

That is the second time I have received this type of scam phone call. Even if I weren’t naturally suspicious, it has been the subject of numerous articles, like this one in The Guardian. But people do continue to fall for them, unfortunately.