Microsoft has filed a lawsuit against an Indian technical support firm as well as a couple of others for misusing its registered trademarks and name. The defendants stand accused of engaging in unfair and deceptive business practices while offering fraudulent technical services to customers.
The Indian company against which Microsoft has acted is called C-Cubed Solution. Its directors are named as Rachel Eilat Haberman, Jay Wurzberger and Marc Haberman. It is a subsidiary of Customer Focus Services (CFS), an entity based in California, and operates the mail server used to get in touch with customers.
Microsoft has also taken Anytime Techies and Omnitech Support to court over the same accusations of trademark violation as well as adopting unfair and deceptive business practices. It intends to get a permanent injunction to restrain and enjoin the defendants from trademark infringement and falsely advertising or promoting the quality or security of its software.
In an official blog post, Microsoft outlines what it has been doing about phoney tech support firms which trick customers into paying them to fix their PCs, get rid of viruses or malware that aren’t actually present in the system and so on. Some even convince users to let them into their computers remotely. The money earned by fraudsters through such scams amounts to millions of dollars.
Also see: With 45% success rate, phishing scams are more effective than you think
Microsoft has a Digital Crimes Unit which looks into cases forwarded to it by the company’s technical support team. This post provides a link to the complaint filed against the three aforementioned firms. It also mentions that Omnitech has purposely created security problems for people by gaining access to their PCs and installing malware, and even a password grabber.
Microsoft has highlighted the fact that fraudulent operations like those conducted by the Indian company and the other two US-based ones named in its lawsuit, claim a relatively high percentage of victims who are senior citizens, the most vulnerable part of the population according to the FBI.
