Recently, we have got a lot of complaints from our customers that they have received a phone call from people with very heavy Indian accents that claim to be a Microsoft employee. Ironically enough, I happened to get a phone call from a man with a thick Indian accent claiming he was an employee from Microsoft the other night at home.
I decided to play along with this fake “Microsoft employee” to see if I could get some personal insight to damage they cause our customers. First it is important to note thatMicrosoft will never cold call you, ever. This is a scam 100% of the time and should be reported to the FTC to help catch these criminals.
The first thing I can tell you is that unlike most telemarketing scams, they try to frighten you. They talk like they are reading a script. They walk you through opening your event viewer and try to convince you that every little error message is a catastrophe waiting to happen. Then they want you to close out of there quickly so that you don’t open any of those viruses (or actually read the errors to see how benign they are).
The next part is talking you in to letting them remote in to your computer. It angers me that they damage the reputation of legitimate remote support services like ours. They use several legitimate tools like teamviewer but what they do next is far from legitimate. The damage they can cause from here is limitless. If you have let these scammers in to your computer, you may need out help.
This is a video example of some of the damage that they do. Some language towards the end.
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