Indian Call Center Scam

Why would a company like Microsoft not be doing all they could be doing to make sure that these guys are not pretending to be Microsoft and/or employed by Microsoft and make its sound like Microsoft is collecting the fees? I almost feels like Microsoft does not care as they are too busy with 'bigger' things then to worry about some scammer pretending that they are Microsoft. It certainly would explain of so many fo the tech nightmares stories you hear about where "I paid Microsoft a lot of money to fix my computer..." ....and they did nothing on my computer" or "...and they made it worse." Microsoft could make it very hard on these guys to claim they were Microsoft if MS just got a easy to remember tech support number and then published it all over making sure to say that that is the ONLY number where you could get real MS support perhaps people would start asking why they are not told to call real MS support number. I know it does not matter to these guys that they are lying about who they are since what they are doing is illegal anyway. Then again there are some of these that answer the phones really believe they have been hired by MS and are employed by them and so unqualified that they believe they are MS tech support and are thrilled to have landed such a prestigious job. I know we all ask why these guys sound so defensive about being called hackers but in India there are those that know they are scammers and there are those hired by a scammer call center that never see what the "senior support techs" do and actually believe that they were hired by Microsoft and work at a Microsoft call center and they are doing a great service by getting the caller lined up for help.

These call centers actually look for the most uneducated from the masses and have some convincing reason to do things like run a tree command and type in a diagnosis and they have no more idea that event viewer is showing normal things when it shows warnings and error and have no clue, other then what they have been told, that they are telling you truly what netstat is showing. Many of the people that answer the calls are from the lowest and most uneducated of the population and they think they are getting a wonderful chance to work and learn. many are promised that the call center experience will lead them to being a MCE or that they got the MCE just by taking the job. I was in India a couple years ago on vacation and met one of these "Microsoft Support Technicians" who was the son of the tour guide we had. He actually ended up in tears to learn that not only was the call center he worked for neither Microsoft itself nor contracted by Microsoft (he was a bit confused on that because his 'bosses' had said it both ways at different times but he had always been assure that he was a MS employee) but that he was not in anyway employed by Microsoft. Server people on our tour were, in fact MS employees and were able to convince him that while he was talking to real MS employees and they were sorry to tell him he was not. He had actually been saving money up to go to Seattle so he could work at the Microsoft main office, and he quite believed that he could arrive in Redmond and walk in the from door with his (fake) MS Id card and be put to work. He also though that after another 6 months at the call center he would be awarded his MCE. The top of the scammer pyramid is not only scamming by charging lots of money for doing nothing but they are scamming many of their own countrymen into thinking that have landed a prestigious job that might either change their caste in life or else get them into a job in the US. Not all are getting pain much either for answering phones but they are jumping on the chance of being able to claim they have a prestigious job at MS.

That is not true of all, there are just as many that are educated and know darn well they are commiting a scam and they are getting paid well to lie but not all call center employee's over there are in on the scam. It seems like any software company that creates a tool that could be used by a scammer for a purpose other then it is meant for certainly, with a few easy additions to their software make in unusable by scammers. Teamviewer has certainly tried by making an announcement that their software could be used in a scam, and so should other remote apps. If Microsoft did something like add some verbiage to things like netstate that gave a brief description of what it was showing so that a scammer could not lie about what it says. Even the Tree or directory command could print a line as it finishes that says "The directory command has finished running, The above is a list of all directories and files on your computer. This is not a diagnostic tool," so that anything a scammer would type in then would look silly. I actually think developers of tools that are then abused by scammers ha s small bit of responsibility to do what they can to make sure a person knows what has just been run on their computer and make its impractical for a scammer to use it.