Quote:
Originally Posted by wdfifteen
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. |
That does sound fishy. You should be fine though. Like I said, three MAC address isn't helpful.
The only way that I can imagine that a MAC address would be useful is if your device phones home and use able to be managed remotely through a central site using the MAC address as the identifier.
I don't think that's likely, but I'm trying to think of any way that the MAC could be used nefariously.
If you're worried, change the password on your router and extender.