Tech support scams rise by 24 percent over a year

Arzella “Sally” Moser is a retired banker in Hayward, Calif., who said she should’ve known better than to be sucked in by a tech support scam.

“I used to be a signature expert,” said Moser, 76. She helped to detect forgeries while working in the fraud division of what is now Chase bank.

Yet she and others — many of them elderly — are among a large number of people targeted by companies pushing a growing scam: bogus tech support. Microsoft said it received 153,000 reports last year from customers who “encountered or fell victim to tech support scams,” a 24 percent rise from the prior year.

Moser and many others became victims of a scam whose accused perpetrator ran Haywardbased Genius Technologies. Parmjit Singh Brar, operator of Genius, reached a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission in June. He must pay $136,000, although under the settlement he neither admits nor denies the allegations.

The FTC accused Brar of working with telemarketers to trick elderly Americans into buying fake tech support services. The telemarketers claimed to be from wellknown tech companies and told people their computers were at risk, the FTC said in a press release. Those who allowed remote access were charged money to get outdated security software installed on their computers, and their personal information was stolen, the FTC said.

The FTC settlement also bars Brar from operating tech support services again.

Brar’s attorney, Guyton Jinkerson, said he had no comment.

Moser got a phone call one morning not long after logging onto her computer to find a message that she had been hacked.

SCAMS