Telephone call scam – Phone call from technician claiming to be from Microsoft

We had been reported by some of our partners and customers that they received phone call from technician claiming to be form Microsoft. It is basically a telephone call scam where the caller is trying to extract credit card details along with the password and other sensitive information. The caller tries to generate fear in the mind of the listener by pointing out some of the Windows Errors and then tries to help the user to solve the same. In the conversation the scammer tries to eventually connect to the users PC remotely and takes control of the PC to just clean the errors and eventually asks for bank details.

Caller who claims to be from Microsoft or some other technical support company working for Microsoft asks the user to do following steps:

Open the Start Menu
Click on Run and type “Eventviewer”
When the Event Viewer opens up they ask to click on Application or Systems on the left side of the pan.

Caller tries to explain that the yellow triangles icons in the list are virus infections and the red cross icons are corrupted software errors and other entries are junk files. Caller tries to convince the user that their PC has too many junk files and is badly infected. Caller then tries to help user by having remote connection to the PC by asking user to visit particular website.

There is no truth in what the caller says and the call is a part of scam to dupe users for some money. Windows Event Viewer is just an OS application to view all the applications and OS messages and logs. It does not point to any infection or junk files.

We would like to inform all our users that Microsoft Support or any other company does not contact customers proactively before you registering any support call with them. We recommend all the readers not to follow any instructions given by unknown technical support person who calls you even if you have not registered any complaint. We also recommend that do not give any credit card details or bank details over phone or online chat.

Usually non technical elderly persons fall victim to such calls. Please educate all the elderly people around you about the scam.