Microsoft, Indian police bust AI-powered tech support scam ring targeting elderly in Japan by Paul Hill Pop-up scams pretending to be Microsoft Working with India’s Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), Microsoft recently assisted in busting a scam network that was targeting the elderly in Japan. The CBI raided 19 locations on May 28, leading to the arrest of six key operatives and the taking down of two call centers. The scammers were impersonating Microsoft specifically and using tech support scams against Japanese seniors. The raid led to the seizure of both digital and physical infrastructure, including computers, storage devices, and phones. The scammers were targeting older adults, who are more vulnerable to fraud. To put this activity to an end, Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit (DCU), the Japan Cybercrime Control Center (JC3), Japan’s National Police Agency (NPA), and India’s CBI conducted significant cross-border collaboration to trace the criminals. Thanks to the internet, cross-border crimes like these have been around for a while and multinational tech firms like Microsoft are making significant efforts to help law enforcement agencies crack down on cybercrime. Artificial intelligence is also starting to be used to make more sophisticated scams. The evolving threat This case reveals an evolution in how Microsoft’s DCU addresses cybercrime involving tech support fraud. Thanks to AI, scammers have been able to scale their operations. In response, Microsoft has moved away from focusing on individual call centers to target the heads of criminal operations and disrupting their technical infrastructure. Notably, Microsoft’s collaboration with JC3 is the first time the DCU has partnered with a Japan-based organization to assist victims. Microsoft is continually getting tips from JC3 about malicious pop-ups urging recipients to call fake technical support lines that claim to be Microsoft. This data has allowed Microsoft to shut down 66,000 malicious domains and URLs globally since May 2024. Microsoft noted that artificial intelligence is now being used by criminals to scale their operations. Some ways in which these entities leverage AI are for victim identification, writing convincing scam emails and building fake web pages, as well as for convincing translations. Anyone can use AI for malicious purposes so it could increase the number of people or groups carrying out attacks. It also makes attacks much more sophisticated and harder to detect and necessitates better consumer protections and more sophisticated security tools such as passkeys to reduce hacks. Protecting vulnerable populations and what readers can do Tech support fraud attacks have been found by the FBI to disproportionately affect older people, resulting in $590 million in losses in 2023 for just older Americans alone. In this operation that targeted Japanese victims, around 90% of the 200 affected people were over 50. If you’ve ever received suspicious communications from a party claiming to be Microsoft, you should know that Microsoft never sends unsolicited emails or makes phone calls requesting personal or financial information, and it doesn’t offer unsolicited tech support. If you do get any suspicious communications, then you should report it to Microsoft so that it can take action.

Firefox is irrelevant in today's internet. Most websites don't work as smooth as any Chromium browsers. Web developers are monopolizing and responsible for this situation.

Microsoft could lead the way with its own apps

Best to just move along with that one, they only post nonsense to rile people up.