Is it a genuine call from Microsoft?

Q  I have a problem with my desktop computer and a company has been telephoning offering to help. They said Microsoft had received error messages from my computer and had passed these on to them (ie to the company that’s calling me).

They also said they worked in a support capacity for Microsoft and received these error messages from the company. However, when this company sent me an email, Microsoft Smartscreen marked it as junk.

How can I decide whether this company is genuine or not?
James Webster

A  Regular readers will know that this is a concern that crops up all the time. However, for the benefit of newcomers, we’re happy to issue the reminder that telephone calls like this are almost certainly fraudulent: Microsoft isn’t in
the business of cold-calling (ie making unsolicited telephone calls) and this is a common scam.

We won’t name the company concerned (though we have passed it on to our Consumeractive team for further investigation), but its website – cited in your original email to us – looks like one of dozens of other dodgy sites we’ve seen over the years. They’re basically fronts for overseas call centres that operate with little or no respect for UK law.

Incidentally, the scam is really little more than a deceptively simple numbers game: by cold-calling lots of different people, a few are bound to be experiencing computer problems and therefore might be more easily hoodwinked into thinking that the call is legitimate.

If you take the bait and ask for their help, the next step would be to hand over your credit card details in exchange for advice that is dubious (it typically involves launching Windows’ Event Viewer tool, which will show lots of errors – but believe it or not that’s actually normal for day-to-day use) and usually costly.

Our advice is simple: hang up on the calls, delete the emails and seek help from a legitimate source – a local computer specialist or Microsoft itself. We would also suggest reading Computeractive's Microsoft Fix It Centre article for various automated fixes.