“Hello, I’m calling from the Microsoft Anti-virus team. We have detected that your computer is infected with a virus.”
If you receive an unsolicited call which starts with a sentence similar to the above then this is an attempt by a scammer to capture your credit card details.
The scam
Their story seems semi-plausible, but is fake: they’re calling from Microsoft and have noticed some strange activity from your computer. To gain credibility, the phone scammer may give you easily discoverable information, such as your name, address, and phone number – all of which is readily available on the internet. Once they have your confidence they tell you to go to a legitimate folder or the Windows Event Viewer and say that if there’s a lot of files or entries in there (which there will be) that it’s very bad and your computer is infected. But fear not! It can all be solved for a reasonable price, plus they’ll continue to support your computer for a year. Just give them your credit card number to be charged a recurring fee and they’ll remotely fix your computer for you.
A remote connection to the computer is set up using legitimate third-party software and it looks like their technician is doing something important by running check disk, disk cleanup and deleting some temporary files. The “technician” then tells the victim that they have a lot of malicious files on their computer and gets them to sign up for a one year support contract to solve the issues. After receiving the credit card details in an insecure manner, as well the name, address, phone number, email address & email password the bad infection appears to be “removed” by deleting the innocent items from the Event Viewer and turning off event logging. Of course, with unrestricted access to the computer, the people behind these operations have the ability to install malicious software they claim to be removing.
This type of scam appears to be on the increase so be forewarned.
Microsoft Technical Support does not make unsolicited telephone calls offering you technical support. You always have to call Microsoft first.
If you do get this type of call keep your Credit Card in your pocket and save your money for when you really need technical support.
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