The Microsoft/Windows team wants to specifically call me?!
I sure must be fortunate and it’s a good thing Microsoft takes the time to call each individual customer on the phone to address potential problems! Oh wait, no they don’t do that…
Ladies and gentleman, please be aware that this happens daily and sadly enough some people are uninformed or are tragically taken advantage of because of their level of trust.
Likelihood Of Authenticity
Microsoft or anyone from the Windows team would not and will not ever call you to speak with you about an individual problem.
Furthermore they will never ask for your credit card or personal information so don’t be foolish and give it out regardless of how convinced you are that they are trying to remedy a problem with your computer system. If you want to know more, you can go to the site and find all the details you need.
The reason I’m writing this post is because today for the second time I’ve received a call from someone pretending to be from the “Windows Live” team. The first occurred probably around a year ago but both calls ended the same way.
I work in IT. I’m a geek by passion and techie by nature. As soon as I hear someone on the phone saying they are from any large company and have noticed something with my particular machine I instantly grin and try and hold back my laughter.
Do You Really Think I’m That Stupid?
The truth is that many people aren’t necessarily stupid, but are unaware or uneducated on the plausibility of this scenario. This simply will NEVER legitimately occur. Now this goes for almost all “random” phone calls where the end result is someone asking for your credit card to fix a problem. Don’t fall for it.
This is still a prominent issue today because there are a lot of people that do in fact believe it’s real and do give out their credit card information in hopes of the mysterious problem being solved.
A Real Life Example
This is a true story that unfortunately happened to a colleague of mine. He got a call from his wife at home who exclaimed that there was a major issue on one of their computers but luckily the windows team called her and informed her of the problem. Yes, she fell for it. find here more information related to computer technology.
Right away my colleague asked shockingly if she gave out their credit card information. “Yes I did and the problem has been solved “, she retorted. Queue the smack on the forehead, rolling eyes and unending head shake.
You have to keep in mind that some things are obvious to people involved in a particular field or expertise but others just don’t know, and when they hear that they’ve caused a problem they are usually eager to fix it.
Back To My Story
Now my two calls were identical and probably the same script my colleagues wife heard.
First an odd caller ID such as “v31702460400001″ comes up, and the number in one of my cases was 1-253-802-0308.
“Hello? I am from the Windows Live team and I’m calling about a problem with one of your computers”. To be honest I haven’t ever heard what they say after that because I can’t help but burst out with, “No your not. Microsoft wouldn’t call someone individually about a problem.”
From there the person on the other end will search their brain for the next words to say, perhaps saying they didn’t understand or couldn’t hear me. I continue on with my allegations that they are a scammer trying to steal from people and need to get a life earning an income legitimately. I’ll start asking for their personal information even though they’ll probably lie and it wouldn’t help much anyway since I doubt the authorities would ever take it seriously and devote time to resolving this repeat issue.
That’s right about where they hang up.
Oddly enough after the call today, 10 minutes later I got a pre-recorded call from 1-250-881-1305 regarding reducing credit card debt etc. If it’s a coincidence or non-related it makes no difference to me as I just hang up on this spam.
Conclusion
Moral of the story is to be logical and never give out your information to anyone who calls you. A few tip offs might be that the Caller ID is numeric or odd, that the caller claims to be from a massive corporation, and not to sound racist but in my two cases just happened to have a foreign accent. Share this with friends and family because chances are, there’s a bunch of them that are just too trusting and will fall for this scam.
Unfortunately, situations like this question the real value of telecommunication customer service. Still there are a lot of companies that use these services so their customers can get friendly and professional operators. Enterprises can use various services instead such as unified communications and collaborations that were created to help multiple devices interact with each other with added security.
Make sure to visit villagevoice for further information.
Check out http://pcnanswers.com/services/24-hour-answering-service/ to learn more.
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