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back to article Microsoft warns on support scams

A survey from Microsoft reveals just how widespread the fake tech support call scam is becoming. The crooks cold-call people at home and claim to be calling from Microsoft or a well-known security firm and offering "free security checks". The software giant surveyed 7,000 computer users in the UK, Ireland, US and Canada and …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    Ah..

    "Redmond said 79 per cent of those tricked suffered financial loss – the average loss was $875 (£542). Losses ranged from just $82 (£51) in Ireland to a whopping $1,560 (£967) in Canada."

    That would be why they keep calling, even though I keep telling them to F*** off..

    Paris: because a lot of people have been shafted, but not in a good way..

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  2. Wibble
    Childcatcher

    Idiot tax

    Darwin writ large?

    0 9
    1. Chris007
      Reply Icon
      FAIL

      That's not fair on everybody

      For those people who are tech savvy then yes it's an idiot tax but for my 75 yr old mother in-law who received one of these calls it is not.

      The fact is that to non-technical people they sound *very* convincing (we had one on speaker phone a while ago and toyed with them). Using subtle and not so subtle scare tactics she was enticed into trying to visit a website which would have installed remote control software.

      Thankfully her BT line was faulty that day and she was unable to get onto the site but they did say they'd call again in a few days. When she put the phone down it dawned on her that she should have hung up earlier and she called her daughter (my wife) in floods of tears fearing her email / bank details etc had all been pilfered. I duly checked the machine and confirmed all ok.

      Amazingly they did call back and try again and she told them where to stick it.

      Fail icon is for you sir.

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      1. Big-nosed Pengie
        Reply Icon
        FAIL

        Title goes here

        You let your 75 year old Mother-in-law use Windows?

        The fail is all yours, sir.

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        1. Chris007
          Reply Icon
          Linux

          Windows is easiest to "support"

          The rest of the family also help her out and they're all used to using windows - giving her Linux would not have been an option neither would buying a mac (too expensive)

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  3. Ralthor
    Linux

    *Fixed

    "Microsoft said if someone claiming to be from Windows or Microsoft Tech Support calls you: "Do not purchase any software or services. Ask if there is a fee or subscription associated with the 'service'. If there is, make sure its us then give us your credit card."

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    1. Blue eyed boy
      Reply Icon
      Unhappy

      So is it a scam?

      What purports to be Microsoft's own tech support website showed something like this - before I could get any actual support I had to pay some (too many) dollars to sonebody. Perhaps it too was a fake

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  4. PartTimeLegend
    WTF?

    I got one of these calls...

    I was so excited, I never get these kinds of scammers calling me.

    He had a thick Indian accent and I'd just got home from a business trip.

    He told me he was calling from " The International Internet Router Team". He told me it was showing that I had slow internet speeds.

    I played along with the dumb idiot and started with the "Oh, it has been slow" bit. Then after a few moments I asked where he was calling from again. He told me then "BT, TalkTalk or one of them".

    I was up for a laugh, and asked which one. He sounded confused and then hung up.

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  5. Winkypop Silver badge
    Mushroom

    These guys are morons!

    Ring

    Ring...

    <call>

    ....long pause.................................................................annoyingly long......................

    Hello?

    Hello?

    Hello?

    Yes hello Sir, I am be calling from [insert bogus company or MS reference here], your computer is having a problem.......

    </call>

    2 1
    1. noboard
      Reply Icon
      Alert

      Actually...

      The best thing to do is keep them on the phone. I always keep them on the phone for a good 20 minutes or so and if everyone else did them same they'd go bust in no time. It also gets you put on a blacklist so you don't get the calls anymore, my phone has been silent for almost a year.

      Regards the calls, they are quite tricky. I had one confused when I said my event log had no errors or warnings in it and he kept asking me what I was looking at to check I was at a computer. I wasn't but he never worked that out.

      Anywho, take 20 minutes out of your life and keep them on the phone, it's the only way to stop them.

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      1. Mark 65
        Reply Icon

        Re:Actually

        Sounds like the exact same call I received and I also thought about the international call angle and keeping them on the phone. Then I realized that scamming bastards like these would be making thousands of calls and no doubt have some way of getting them as cheap as chips.

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        1. Anonymous Coward
          Reply Icon
          FAIL

          Not the point

          yes, the *calls* are cheap. But the *time* of the droid trying to fleece you isn't.

          If it took them 5,000 hours of people-time to make $1 instead of 5 minutes, then the whole scam would simply evaporate.

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      2. andypbw
        Reply Icon

        Ubuntu FTW

        I managed to keep mine on the line for nearly 10 minutes before having to admit that I was sat in front of Ubuntu 11.04. He didn't seem to have heard of it.....

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        1. Big-nosed Pengie
          Reply Icon
          Trollface

          Title goes here

          One hour.

          Is that a record?

          "Are you seeing a Windows logo on the bottom left hand corner of your screen, sir?"

          "No. I can't see anything like that."

          "What are you seeing?"

          "I can see an orange circle."

          "Please be clicking on the orange circle, sir. You will be seeing a list of applications which is including 'my computer'".

          "No. The list is [reads list]"

          "That is being very strange sir. I'll will be asking my supervisor for help. Please be holding."

          Etc. These morons, including the "MSCE", never once twigged that I was using Linux. Eventually I got bored and told them where to shove it.

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      3. Richard Pennington 1
        Reply Icon
        Pirate

        Keep them on the phone

        I have a cordless phone, so putting it down doesn't cut the connection. Putting it down next to a loudspeaker-load of 20th century "musique concrète" (classical music with no recognisable tune and not too easy on the ears) and leaving it for half an hour somehow gives scam-callers the right idea. Or put the phone down next to some noisy machinery. And go into another room for a while.

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      4. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Trollface

        Re: Actually

        Indeed, keep them on the phone, and if you've a while spare then there's childish fun to be had too:

        After 'failing' to get their LogMeInRescue (which gives permits administrative tasks as well as remote desktop control), they gave up and switched to ShowMyPC instead. This uses VNC over SSH and is therefore relatively safe, and also lets you restrict the connection to one specific windows.

        Suggestions for this include restricting them to an instance of MS Paint showing a screenshot of a Windows desktop, or to VLC playing something appropriate. I'm sure more creative types could come up with some far superior ideas.

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        1. Anonymous Coward
          Reply Icon
          Devil

          Maybe

          A CIA desktop ....

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      5. AndyDent
        Reply Icon
        Unhappy

        Keeping them on the phone doesn't work

        I was working at my mothers' farm one day when one of these regular callers rang and as I was working on something fairly undemanding, decided to spin them out and see what they did.

        Their spiel is scarily convincing for anyone non-technical - they wallk people through a number of commands including showing actual error events in the event viewer that don't take much spin to sound scary.

        I stopped it short of clicking on the web page link that was their GotoMyPC, and was doing that in a more secure environment than a PC browser.

        Wasting their time for over an hour and telling them I just wanted to see their URL so I could report them didn't do anything to prevent the sods from continuing to call her.

        Mentioning the word criminal fraud does make them hang up very quickly though ;-)

        This is in the South-west of Western Australia and I suspect they are targeting a lot of the older residents in that area.

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        1. Roger Mew
          Reply Icon

          On phone

          These people ring from places like Africa etc. I enjoy chasing them and one went back to an internet cafe in Africa.

          I spoke to the owner and told him that we are fraud chasers and that his shop was being used for internet fraud. I gave him some details and he found the culprit, I could hear a VERY heated conversation. I said the best thing he could do was hand the police his details and let them contact ( a certain authority) to ascertain.

          Another was in the Yahoo offices in the US and no not Calif, another in a company in Austria.

          Its good fun, especially as nearly all the machines here in France have these problems as the operatives are so naive!!!

          Being on the phone costs nought we can be on the phone with Skype all day for nought extra.

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  6. Ryan Clark
    WTF?

    loads

    Had loads of these calls in the last few months. Played a long with a few but getting very bored with them now. The "virus" on my machine was demonstrated by showing he knew what the CLISID for zfsendtotarget is .

    BT most unhelpful in investigating whether they came from a single number and getting them stopped (wanted me to buy a premium service)

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  7. AdamW
    Devil

    press start

    I couldnt find the start menu in KDE, the poor chap kept telling me where it was, he was suggesting i had to load IE and visit some page...

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  8. Blue_Skunk
    Facepalm

    I got called also

    I played along while people on a teamspeak server listened to me. I got past the first level of indian phishers and got put onto the second line of scammers that actually try to get money/remote access.

    A lot of my customers get these calls so i wanted to see what they said

    I played along for quite a while but then hung up.. he had the balls to call me back twice even after i told him i knew it was a scam.

    In the end he got really quite abusive and told me i was a bad computer engineer if i thought i wasn't infected and therefore needed help.

    my favourite quote from the angry indian was that i was 'not authorised to say it was a scam'

    He ended by telling me to 'go f@ck myself'... i think i got to him

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    1. The Fuzzy Wotnot
      Reply Icon
      Happy

      Brilliant stuff!

      "In the end he got really quite abusive and told me i was a bad computer engineer if i thought i wasn't infected and therefore needed help."

      Superb, made my lunchtime just a bit brighter!

      I think my reply would have been, "I'm not earning £2/hour cold-calling people to scam money from them, not a penny of which I will get instead going into the back account of some other rich bastard, and I need help?!"

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  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I had one of these call me.

    I must have wasted about quarter of an hour of his time (on an international phone call) mixing all of the worst qualities of the many stupid users i've ever had the displeasure of encountering.

    It was great fun. I couldn't beleive how taken aback he was when he asked if I was on win7, vista or XP and after a while faffing around asking him how you found out I asked if "Windows 98" written up the side of the start bar was the version of windows I was running. Poor bloke didn't seem to be trained on 9x, he was adamant that I needed to let him RDC in immediately. On 98!

    I'm honestly not sure if he hung up because he figured out that I knew more than I was telling or he just got to the "I want to beat them senseless" state that a bad user can get you to after quarter of an hour of frustration. Not that he could ever remote into the virtual version of 98 running solely in my memory, but hey. I did think about claiming 95, but it's been so long that i'm not convinced I could have faked it convincingly.

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      International Call Costs

      Alas wasting their time is all you will achieve by making them use up time on the phone - they will not be paying any international call costs and will probably not even be paying ANY call costs. These people will be using hacked VoIP servers to route the calls so they do not trace back to them. Just look up google for voip hacker list and search through the first few results to see how many attacks are going on (there are even lists of where the attacks come from for the really curious).

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      1. Jedit Silver badge
        Reply Icon
        Pirate

        Time is money

        If you take a scammer all the way through his spiel before you let him know you're wise to him, then you have reduced the number of people who can be scammed by one. For the expense of 10 or 15 minutes of your time, you have caused the scammer to lose anywhere from the £50 "premium service" scam fee up to the thousands that can be pillaged from someone's bank account. If all of us reading did it just three or four times, they would lose millions.

        So yes, I do consider wasting their time to be a profitable use of mine.

        5 0
    2. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      NetMeeting

      Scammer education really isn't what it used to be.

      Anyone else remember NetMeeting?

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  10. David Bond

    Happening in Norway

    I had one of these calls last week, my wife answered and they told her they were from tech support for our computer, she said, you can talk to my husband, and passed it to me. Then the woman said Hello David (hadnt told her) and went on to say that she was from the support department for my PC, I asked so which PC is this, she just repeated it again. Then she changed to Microsoft and that there was a virus going around infecting computers and that they were calling everyone :) to check if your computer had it, I said, ok, wondering what the aim of the scam would be I let her carry on, so she asked if i was at my computer, I said I was and that it was on, I said yep, then she asked me to go to the event log, I asked her then, so what virus is this supposed to be? My wife then said, just tell her you work in IT, then, the woman hung up.

    The whole call was also in english, and were also calling from Angola/Guatemala (+127). They called me around 10 times in 1 hour, I was out for the first lot of calls.

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  11. Bassey

    I thought I had the answer

    I'd been called by one of these and just hung up but thought it might be "cleverer" to tell them I didn't have a computer if they ever phoned back. Bad move. The bloke insisted that I DID have a computer and could I please log into it so that he could fix it for me. This went back and forth for some time ("but I don't have a computer so why would I have a slow internet connection" - "Oh but Sir our records certainly show that you have the internet so can you please start your computer so that I can help you to fix the slow connetion" etc) before I gave up and put the phone down.

    Fair play to "Jack" though. He was persistent.

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  12. mark 63 Silver badge
    Joke

    I feel left out!

    I feel left out! why havent I had any of these calls?

    Is it possible these crooks actually adhere to the no-cold-calls list?

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Me neither ...

      ... although I know many other who have. None of them daft enough to have fallen for it though.

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  13. Anonymous Coward
    Linux

    Play them at there own game

    I got one of those the other week,,

    played dumb GRIN after a half hour of no i dont use ie i use firefox

    no i dont see a start button

    He went off to get his supervisor who after giveing him a flea in the ear

    I told him I use Linux

    If all the computer savvy people take up a half hour of there time hopefully you can make it in UNeconomic for them

    A.C for obvious reasons

    2 1
  14. nyelvmark

    What about caller ID?

    Do the scammers spoof this? Isn't that illegal?

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    1. Znort666
      Reply Icon

      I believe...

      they do. My mother had one of these calls and luckily had the wherewithall to inform them that I worked in IT and had Admin control of all her PCs so would look at it for her. The number is actually 1 digit short of a UK number and when she tried to ring back, was unable to connect.

      Another friend had a call as well and actually aloowed them access, but again, luckily I had set up an Admin account and she only had Standard user access so couldn't install any of their software as she didn't have the password.

      I am waiting for them to call me, although everyone else in my house uses windows I have Ubuntu and would love to waste some of there time...

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  15. aj06

    Phone Support Scams

    I have had 2 phone calls within the last 10 days purporting to be from Microsoft. When I questioned them as to why they were attempting to scam me, they both panicked and slammed their phones down.

    Both had distinct Indian accents!

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  17. Anonymous Coward
    Facepalm

    Ha!

    I've had 4 of these calls - all from people with thick Indian accents claiming to be from "The WIndows 7 support desk".

    The first two times I just told them straight that I didn't have windows and hung up. The third time I played along... When he asked me to click on the start button, I told him "I don't have a start button", which was true 'cos I have a Mac!

    The fourth time I just pretended to do what he told me. It involved going to a certain (non-MS) site and downloading some "helpful software". It also involved deleting certain files which I'm sure are pretty vital to Windows.

    What I was most interested in is:

    1, How the got my phone number in the first place!

    2, How they could possibly claim to know my phone number based upon only having my IP address...

    3, Why they thought I would have Windows.

    My flatmate has also had one of these calls from the "Windows 7 support desk". She has Windows on her laptop but not Windows 7!

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    1. Peter Gathercole Silver badge
      Reply Icon
      Holmes

      Possible answers

      1. They might have access to leaked phone number lists, or they may have a copy of a Directory Enquiries CD set from BT, or they might just make them up!

      2. They probably don't. It's just a line dangled to make them appear more plausible. Alternatively, they may have some leaked information from BT or your ISP, because it is certain that at a known time, those organisations know which IP address is allocated equipment on which phone line.

      3. Windows is ubiquitous. For home systems, chances are that at least 90% of homes with a computer have a Windows variant rather than a Mac, Linux or other system. And even those with Linux probably have Windows installed somewhere as a dual boot.. The Reg. readership are not typical. My house as all three (Win2000, WinXP, and Win7, OSX, and Linux), as well as an AIX box.

      I suppose that there will be an increasing number of houses that have broadband for just their TV, gaming console, iPad or Android Pad. I wonder how the ISP's will cope with supporting such customers? At the moment they all appear to be geared around having a Windows box around.

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  18. ukgnome
    FAIL

    You say, I say

    Thats the game I play,

    You say I have slow internet speed and I say you have slow internet speed.

    They say I have a virus and I say Your computer is infected.

    They say I am calling from microsoft, and I say I am answering a microsoft phone.

    I try and keep this up for as long as I can, the loser is the one who laughs or profanes first.

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  19. Mark Wilson

    TCP/IP?

    I like trying different tactics with these guys and seeing what they come up with.

    One of my favourites is "how did you get my number?" the response was "throught the Internet protocol"

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    1. John F***ing Stepp
      Reply Icon

      Phone number through IP address.

      Sometimes I get bored and google the IPs of hacking attempts at the server here; address and phone number (of a BOT-Zombie) are usually supplied.

      (and no, I don't call up some poor shnook at 3 am to tell him or her their computers infected. I just lock out that IP)

      In your case this assumes they actually have that IP address and are not just WAR dialing a block of numbers.

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  20. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    Title? We don' need no steenkin' title...

    I spent a few weeks at home between jobs a little whole back and seemed to receive an inordicante number of these calls. I've played pretty well all the games other contributors have described, I've asked if the callers mother is proud of what they do for a living, on a couple of occasions I've simply launched a tirade of the foulest, most racist abuse I could think of (no, it's not big, no it's not clever, no I'm not proud of it), but I'm a lot calmer about the whole thing now, and these days if there's a pause beyond a second or two before someone comes on the line I simply put the 'phone down and walk away.

    I'm sure there are very many fine people in India (in fact I know there are, I've worked with quite a few), that most of them wouldn't dream of getting involved with swindling and robbing innocent people, and that of the rest most regard themselves as basically honest, are just trying to make ends meet, keep some kind of roof over the kids head etc any way they can, and if it's at the expense of (relatively) wealthy residents of former colonial powers then that's just fair game (and hey, they might just have the beginnings of the kernel of some kind of arguable point there...), but when I speak to friends or relatives who've just been on the end of this or some other variety of 'phone scam over a dodgy VOIP connection from Bangalore there are times when I think that if anyone actually deserved to live next door to an unstable neighbour with nuclear weapons and a military/security establishment which seems to have an unhealthy relationship wth religious extremists it would be the people working in those call centres...

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Devil

      An alternative game

      Act as if you're the callee on a phone sex chat line. They generally hang up when you ask for their credit card no before you'll finish them off.

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    2. nyelvmark
      Reply Icon

      Unstable?

      >>I think that if anyone actually deserved to live next door to an unstable neighbour with nuclear weapons and a military/security establishment which seems to have an unhealthy relationship wth religious extremists it would be the people working in those call centres...

      So, you think they're in Canada, then?

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    3. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      FAIL

      This title contains only letters...

      I like the line "is your mother proud of what you do for a living?". Thanks; I shall add it to my normal response, which is to say, "What you are doing is scamming; are you proud of the fact that you cheat widows and orphans out of their hard-earned cash?" and slam down the phone.

      While I would like to spin them out for a while, my time is too precious to waste with these tossers.

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  21. Tom 35

    I'm calling from Microsoft network support...

    me- Why are you telling me about your dick?

    them- What? Long silence followed by click.

    1 0
  22. lawndart

    What do you mean, not called you?

    I get called far, far too often; frequently two in the evening, for at least the last eighteen months.

    I have tried blowing whistles, slamming big books shut, boiling the kettle and generally giving them a hard time but they still keep ringing.

    I have "used" various different OS in this time, just to keep them on their toes, up to and including confusing a Sinclair programmable calculator with a computer (yes, it still works although the 9v battery cover has long since gone walkabout).

    Regardless of the name they give me, if they sound Indian I call them Rani to wind them up.

    I have a test rig for fixing computers and this is nomally booted from CD for whichever OS I need and has an empty hard drive. One day I may let one of the callers amok on it and see how much fun I can have as they dig about in a sandbox.

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    1. Znort666
      Reply Icon

      I like that idea...

      maybe I should set up my VIC20 if they call me and get them to talk me through the problem...

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  23. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I had a few...

    I've had a few of these, but as I got more annoyed about them, I started to waste the time of the guys on the other end, rather than just hanging up or bollocking them.

    The last one I let the guy go through his script, then he asked me to open IE, I said I couldn't becuase I dont' have IE, he then presumed that I would be able to open Safari, which suggests they are geared up for Mac too. I told him that I use linux, he said he'd put me through to the linux department, and accidentally cut me off... I haven't been called back since.

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  24. James Boag
    Stop

    Funny that

    The Scammers have the same accents the the Telco out source to, About time BT TalkTalk ect we ask why these guys have our numbers .

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