Richmond agreed. "The demographics for Mac users is that they have more money to waste, so I wouldn't doubt that they would become a target," he said.

These phone scams aren't new. Last year, for example, similar schemes making the rounds.

"It's a natural extension of the fake antivirus stuff," said Marc Fossi, a director in Symantec's security response team, in an interview today.

Those scams, often dubbed "scareware" or "rogueware," use higher-volume methods -- poisoned search results and spam email -- to trick users into visiting malicious sites that proclaim a PC or Mac is heavily infected. Users are encouraged to download security software to fix the nonexistent problems, but to get rid of the resulting bogus alerts, victims must fork over fees that can reach $80.

by several scareware campaigns last month, the first time they had been targeted by such scams.