Is This Fraud?

Question

A few days ago I got a new computer. I needed to transfer a license for Acrobat 8 to my new machine. I set up an Adobe ID and went through a process with some people from India to attempt to transfer my installation to my new machine without success. After four hours of installing and uninstalling the software I asked to speak to a manager. He soon advised that the file I was downloading would not work on the new machine because installation of acrobat 8 was an upgrade. In the meantime the software had been removed from my old machine and deactivated. So naturally I wanted to have it reinstalled. They told me nothing could be done and I should go to the forms for further help.

I posted on the acrobat forum and quickly received a email response from someone going by Kayla Webster Adobe(forums_noreply@adobe.com).

"Kindly provide your Google Hangouts registered Email ID.. Or You can Directly send Email to our Customer Care Team at Adobedesk@usa.com and they will help you via Email."

and later,

"Kindly provide your Adobe registered Email ID and the Password which you use to Login on Adobe.com"

I gave it to them. Then they responded,

"We would like to inform you that Acrobat 8 is too old and no longer available and supported with Windows 10 64 Bit And Secondly Acrobat 8 servers have been shut down. If you will try to install or update it further then it will create conflict with your system. so we can do is we provide you the Acrobat Pro 2017 so you can able to start your work in a proper way."

Some haggling went on, then the offered,

" We have checked with our supervisors we nothing to do with Acrobat 8 but we can do is the best for you is we provide you the Acrobat XI Pro after all the best discounts US$119 this all we can do.

The Team Adobe"

I asked if I would get a disk, so Adobe couldn't rip me off again.

"It's a Digital Download and will save the Downloaded file on your Computer and copy the Setup file into your External USB Hard drive."

I agreed, and they sent me a very official looking pdf receipt from:

Adobe Systems Incorporated

29322 Network Place Chicago, IL

60673-1293 Federal Tax ID 77-0019522

Then the sent this :

Perfect! http://download.teamviewer.com/download/TeamViewerQS_en.exe Open this link then one file going to download once download complete open the file from downloads and it will gives you ID and password then Provide the ID Number And Password.

They took over the computer and installed something, which struck me as off, demonstrated that it worked, then sent a PayPal request for payment to "Sanjay Tyagi." That's when I closed the remote session and demanded an explanation of who this was. They repeatedly would not identify the company they worked for and demanded I give them access again so they could remove the software. I refused, and they said I would go on the "black list." I later got email from "Kayla" saying they were legit, but I asked for her Adobe email and phone. Crickets.

Adobe in San Jose didn't want to hear about it. Can someone from Adobe please contact me and advise what to do next?

Dov Isaacs · Accepted Answer

You asked for “someone from Adobe” and as such I will respond on behalf of Adobe:

(1) Yes, you've been scammed.

(2) No one from Adobe would ever respond to you from a domain other than @adobe.com. And the Chicago address given on the supposed receipt is bogus as well.

(3) Neither Adobe nor any Adobe Authorized Reseller has sold licenses for Acrobat 11 or earlier licenses for over four years (and whatever is licensed from Adobe or an Adobe Authorized Reseller would ever be downloaded from a third party server).

(4) You very likely have had some form of malware, spyware, key loggers, etc. installed on your system. We would strongly advise that you should follow the advise provided in an earlier response and totally wipe your system and restore it from your most recent full system back (you do regular full backups of your system, don't you?)!! Otherwise, you may make your problems even worse.

(5) There is no reason why you would ever need to provide your Adobe ID and password to a real Adobe agent. Assuming that these criminals haven't already logged onto your Adobe account with those credentials, changed the password, and compromised your account, you should immediately logon to your Adobe account and immediately change your password. If the account has been compromised already, contact Adobe Customer Care by phone and they will assist as best as possible.

(6) As advised earlier in this thread, if you have a new computer, Acrobat 8 (released over 12.5 years ago), is not going to fully and properly install or work on a “new machine” whether MacOS or Windows. For a new system, you need to license either Acrobat 2017 (“perpetual license”) or Acrobat DC (subscription, preferred for any number of reasons). Although an update to Acrobat 8, Acrobat 8.1 can be coerced to install on Windows 10, it doesn't properly work with modern versions of Microsoft Office and browsers.

(7) We are sorry if any of our technical support staff even attempted to help install Acrobat 8 on a new computer since that isn't something that we do support and this old software version in any way whatsoever! They were trying to be accommodating, but were in many respects setting you up for disappointment and for seeking a solution that invited scamsters in to take advantage of your situation. But Adobe did not rip you off!

(8) We regularly delete and pursue any scammers who attempt to ply their wares on our website. But unless we do a full background check on every new subscriber to the forums and vet every single posting on the forums before we allow the posting their posts to go through (which obviously result in postings taking hours or days to actually post, we can't prevent some transient criminal activity. On the other hand, as a participant on these forums and in this particular case, it was pretty obvious that scammers were involved via use of non-Adobe e-mail addresses and domains.

- Dov

Bernd Alheit · Answer

adobedesk@usa.com is a scam email address.

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