877-812-8410

My mom had a Microsoft image pop up on her laptop stating that she had a bunch of viruses on her laptop.  She was told to call this number, and the guy had an Indian accent and said that their company was hired by Microsoft to do technical support and that it was going to cost almost $400 to fix it.  He also told my mom that her husband's computer had been affected too.  He also gave her the number 1-866-955-7984 ext 309.  Is this a scam?  I'm thinking it may be.  For now, I told her to go into safe mode.

It is definitely a scam. Microsoft does not use outside contractors for support and there is nothing in the Windows operating system that can generate these pop-ups. They are the result of ads served up by ad servers on various websites without the knowledge of the website owners. Usually using Task Manager to kill your browser causes them to go away until the next website that has them.  You can often just keep clicking the X in the upper corner of the window until you get the message "Do you really want to navigate away from this page?" and hit Yes. You will also probably want to clear the cache and history in the browser before visiting websites again.  Make sure her anti-virus and malware software is up to date for her.

Mike in MD -  Thank you so much for the quick reply!!

This just happened to me today too!  Same guy with accent, but it popped up when trying to install Office 2013. His name was Allan same #.  This guy gets around...