Microsoft support telephone scam

9th April 2019 Off By 64-BIT computing
Microsoft support telephone scam

An old topic but lately I have been seeing a few of these fake it support / Microsoft support telephone calls again.

On this particular occasion, the user in question let them onto the computer and after some time they started to demand money for a service they didn’t need. The user refused and the caller got angry and proceeds to lock the user out of their computer.

Firstly they locked the users account by changing the password followed by changing the main administrator password and to finish of they also encrypted the system via syskey effectively holding them to ransom.

Wiki states thatSyskey is a utility that encrypts the hashed password information in a SAM database in a Windows system using a 128-bit RC4 encryption key.

So is the user is locked out?

On paper yes they are as they don’t have the passwords, but being big fans of Linux there is a tool for everything.

We did remove all the lock outs the fake IT support user put in place but after running a couple of security scans with different tools we also found a host of malware / spyware and Trojans.

So please beware…

*Microsoft will not call you and no IT company can tell if your computer has errors unless they have remote motoring installed on your pc. So unless you have paid for such service from a company it is a scam.

Commmon Phone scams

  • Banks Scams
  • Computer repair scams
  • Compensation calls
  • HMRC scams
  • Number spoofing
  • Pensions and investment scams
  • ‘Anti-scam’ scams

Best thing anyone can do if in doubt is to HANG UP and or if you do fall foul to one of these scams. Please give us a call and lets see what we can do.