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Wisconsin Woman Scammed Via Fake ‘Tech Support’ Company

With tech support frauds still occurring; Neenah (Wisconsin) resident Janice Swanek, recently, got victimized in one such incidence when she got telephone call from a person asserting he represented the technical department of Microsoft and had to say that Janice's PC had contracted a virus infection.

Apparently, the department had been receiving warning messages about Janice's system showing error messages suggesting presence of contaminated files, Ms. Swanek said. When she began questioning, the caller stated that Janice was using Microsoft's OS, which was constantly linked up with the software company's technical department which was monitoring for anything like the above.

Elaborating further, Swanek said that the caller who introduced himself with an unreal name also gave a false badge number. Her computer was accessed from some unknown source which executed scans to discover numerous files, which seemingly had viruses.

According to Swanek, she became convinced with the caller's suggestion of getting additional anti-viral safeguards for her PC, so she ended up buying one subscription costing $199 from the person, in the process even revealing her payment card number to him.

Subsequently, DATCP (Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection) of Wisconsin indicated that letting such scammers gain admission into one's PC, medical records, tax details, banking information or any additional personal information like addresses, birth dates, Social Security Numbers, or routing/banking A/C numbers, everything became susceptible to theft.

The scammers, said Janice, by executing one scan operation made believe that the malware she downloaded indeed did harm. Subsequently, when she talked to Microsoft they told her that the Security Essentials application she bought of the company was, in reality, free software. Consequently, she became sure she'd been defrauded.

And though these uncomplicated frauds likely appear clear to anybody having slight knowledge about PCs, people not sufficiently tech-savvy, likely get enticed into becoming ensnared via such false tech support firms.

Therefore, officials from Wisconsin DATCP stated that incase anyone got such a tech support communication over phone he must just hang up. And suppose the person thought his computer was really infected, he should rather talk to one trustworthy tech support firm near his place.

» SPAMfighter News - 2/3/2014

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