The warning comes as National Cyber Security Awareness Month kicks off this week.
“We’ve had 50 calls about this specific scam in the last month and that’s a lot,” said Ohio Attorney General Mike Dewine.
A Bowersville woman said her father was targeted by suspicious callers and she wanted to warn others.
“It made me angry that they would do this to my father, but then I got to thinking there are other people out there that don’t know these people are out there trying to scam them,” Peggy Stoops said.
Stoop’s father, Ralph Milburn, said he received at least 15 suspicious calls to his cell phone over the last few weeks.
“He couldn’t understand the caller, so he brought me the phone. The caller said they had reports from the computer saying that a lot of viruses had been downloaded and he needed access so he could help clean it out, otherwise our computer was going to crash. It sounded scary to me but I wasn’t buying it,” Stoops said.
Stoops said she called Microsoft and was informed that the company would never call a consumer and request remote access, and that the caller was trying to scam her.
The scammers are getting bold, Dewine said.
“If you refuse to do what they want, they get belligerent. What they are trying to do is intimidate you,” Dewine said.
Stoops said she was relieved she and her father didn’t fall for it.
Consumers can report suspicious callers at www.ohioattorneygeneral.gov.
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