I just received a call from someone pertaining to be from Microsoft telling me that there was a problem with my computer. The person said that he would be more than happy to help me find the problem on my computer and then they could help me fix it.

Just to further set the scene for you - the call was from a very noisy call centre with a really bad connection. It is also very important to know that we are an IT Support company based in Dublin and it is usually the iPing team who are calling people to help them with their computers and not the other way around. So it was very strange and suspicious for me to get this on spec call. I should probably also note that iPing is a Microsoft partner and this is not something they would usually call us about.

So in taking all of the above into account and being very suspicious that this was a crank call, I nonetheless went through the motions to see what it was I was asked to do so that I could let you know when you are at risk of being scammed.

1. The first thing he asked me to do was to open up a very specific part of the windows event viewer so that he could show me that my computer was reporting some spurious and fake errors. He was doing this to build some trust.
2. Once he thought that he had convinced me that my computer had errors and that he had my trust, he wanted to connect into my computer and fix the problems.
3. When I asked him how he was going to connect into my computer, he said he wanted me to go to a website and enter some details and this would allow him to connect to my computer.

When we got to the above stage I just hung up the phone as I was now very happy that this person was a not the kind of IT support person you want to be dealing with. I had considered letting him connect into a virtual computer for some fun but I decided I had enough real work to do for some of my excellent customers and this person had taken up enough time.

After hanging up the phone, I got a call back again about ten minutes later from the same person, wondering what had happened. I told him that I knew he was a scammer trying to steal my credit card information, and he was going to get some serious bad karma for doing work like this. He asked me what made me think this and I told him that he was speaking to the owner of an IT support company and that we deal in ensuring people do not have IT problems.

Again I told him his karma was taking a beating and that he should find a better job. At this stage he lost the plot and started shouting down the phone at me calling me many bad names that I cannot mention in a business IT blog but I will be more than happy to share with you over a pint.

In summary if you get a call similar to the above from a very loud call centre saying that the person is calling you from Microsoft and the person says you have problems with your computer - you need to be very careful. As you can see from this link, Microsoft will never call you unless you call them first to report a problem to them.

We have spoken to quite a few companies in Dublin and the surrounding areas and these cyber criminals seem to be targeting people and companies in this area with this scam. We think they have extensive lists of phone numbers and are automatically dialling them and hoping to catch people unaware.

This is the attempt of the iPing IT Support team to help educate you on good IT Security.

Be Safe.