Microsoft Helps India Fight Fake Support Centers

Dhir Acharya - Nov 30, 2018

India, the home country to technology support centers, has witnessed a growth of scams. Hence, Indian police and Microsoft have to kick in.

In the suburban areas of India’s New Delhi, scammers created fake centers. According to reports on Wednesday, the scammers sent out warnings as well as phoned people, telling them that an unidentified virus has got into their computers.

Among the targeted people, the majority ignored the alerts and did not receive calls, but a few did. For those who answered the calls, the scammers offered them services to get rid of the virus that cost from $100 to $1,000. Microsoft discovered that most victims were mostly from America, Australia, and Canada among 15 or more countries targeted.

Microsoft worked with police to tracked down the locations of the fake centers, conducting 16 attacks and about 36 arrests within just two days, November 27 and 28. Back in October, there were ten similar raids which resulted in around 24 arrests.

Assistant general counsel Courtney Gregoire of Digital Crimes Unit at Microsoft wrote in an email that the scale of this problem in India is illustrated by how unregulated support centers have developed such frauds and scams. Based on reports from victims, this problem is happening all over the world, which targets at victims coming from developed English speaking countries, Gregoire wrote.

Earlier 2018, the tech giant was aware of the increasing scamming issue. The company said its customers across the globe reported 153,000 scams to the customer support services just in 2017.

In terms of the scams, the vibrancy of India’s outsourcing industry, causing countries from across the world to put their call centers here, makes the most contribution worsen the issue. According to NYT, the legit call centers generate total annual revenue of $28 billion and give jobs to approximately 1.2 million Indians, but also encourage scammers to create fake support centers.

For further details, the fake centers are not necessarily for tech services. In October, CBC News informed that police arrested 28 people for pretending to be officials from Canadian Revenue Agency.