'Microsoft' Scam Callers Arrested After Years of Terrorising the Technically Challenged (gizmodo.co.uk)

An anonymous reader shares a report: Those shameless scammers that cold-call people pretending to be from Microsoft and demanding money after walking users through supposed problems with their computers? They're going down, it seems, with four people arrested in the UK for enabling the rip-off. City of London Police and Microsoft, the real Microsoft, have been working together for two years to trace the operators of the scheme, with the four people -- two from Woking and two from South Shields -- arrested on suspicion of fraud. Although the calls were found to originate from India, the investigators found that the scam was allegedly being run out of the UK, with the poor overseas callers working from scripts and, presumably, not really aware they're doing anything hugely wrong.

Comments

Right.

[cheesybagel]

I got a phone call from someone claiming to be from Microsoft and that my computer had a virus. Which was... interesting to say the least. Considering that I never gave Microsoft my phone number in the first place. The guy on the phone line had the most ridiculous accent.

Easy way to stop this sort of scam

[buss_error]

There is a fairly easy way to stop all kinds of scams like this.

Issue "Fraud cards" to LEO.

What, might you ask, is a fraud card? It's a special card that will stop a merchant account. Shut it down. Scammer calls a undercover LEO or their call is forwarded to them, LEO gives them the number, and as soon as it hits the card processor, it locks the merchant account and triggers a fraud investigation into that merchant account.

Full stop.

As for checking, that would be a tiny bit harder but not insurmountably so. Bit coin I doubt much could be done about it since the point of crypto currency is to avoid LE as much as possible.