Statewide Iowa — Many Iowans have answered their phones to hear a distant caller claiming to be with Microsoft and offering to “fix” their computers.
A new survey finds the extent to which those tech support scams are reaching us — and ripping some of us off. Mary Jo Schrade, with the Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit, says three in five of us have received those calls, and one in six lost money on them.
The con artists are using sophisticated schemes that have evolved from cold calls to more of them using fake pop-up ads and fraudulent websites.
Microsoft gets 6,500 complaints every month from people reporting they were victims of a tech support scam in which scammers use the company’s name to lure victims into paying for unnecessary or harmful “services.” Many thousands more are going unreported.
While you might think young people would be more tech savvy, the survey found one out of ten Millennials and one out of ten Gen Z’ers who encountered a scam fell for it — and lost money.
