Quote:
Originally Posted by KC911
You are OK. Giving out your router's MAC address does no harm.
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Are you serious? All the other replies are obviously jokes, so I'm not sure about this one.
What happened is:
My wifi extender stopped connecting to the router. I bought a new, similar Netgear extender and
IT wouldn't connect to the router. I went online to Netgear's help page and went through the procedure to set it up and while I was there a pop-up appeared offering to a chat to help me.
Looking back, I wonder if this pop-up was someone outside of Netgear that somehow popped up on their website. Or maybe it wasn't really Netgear's site to begin with.
Anyway, I said OK and they connected me with a technician. The technician had that familiar accent that tells you he isn't from the USA. He couldn't get it to connect either and in the process of trying he asked for my MAC address and my zip code. He came back and said there were 42 devices connected to my router. I have about 10, maybe 12 or 15, but 42 is out of the question. No one lives within 300 yards of my router, so it isn't a neighbor stealing service. I haven't been experiencing any buffering or unusually slow connections.
He went on to tell me people can piggyback onto your router from anywhere (never heard of that) and he could shoo them away and set up a "cloud based firewall" for a nominal fee based on my usage and my location. This started to sound fishy. On the one hand, by this time we had been on the phone together for 30 to 45 minutes which is a long time to run a scam. But I was suspicious, so my phone battery ran down
and the call ended.
So now somebody that I don't trust has the MAC address on my router.
BTW I was able to get the extender to connect to my router by myself, so I'm not a
complete idiot.