Company Updates

Five Tips to Help You Avoid Tech Support Phone Scams

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For the past several years, we’ve highlighted to customers the technical support scams plaguing companies around the world, including in the IT industry. These scams are not new. Fraudsters continue to design ways — from fake websites to phishing emails— to steal personal information for criminal purposes.

woman sitting at a cafe looking at her smartphone

One such scam affecting Dell and other well-known companies — the telephone technical support scam — is becoming increasingly sophisticated and difficult to distinguish from legitimate tech support calls. In this scam, individuals claiming to work for Dell make unsolicited calls to customers and insist there is a technical problem with their Dell product. They ultimately try to defraud customers by pressuring them to pay to fix the issue.

Our thanks to those who have alerted us that they have been contacted by scammers. This information has been invaluable to Dell in helping us investigate these scams. We’re also working alongside our industry peers and law enforcement to aggressively address this issue.

So, what’s the result? We know that sharing information on these scams has led to positive developments. Scammer websites have been shut down, fraudulent call centers closed, their participants prosecuted, and suspect internet addresses blocked from payment processing companies. However, these scams continue to operate. When we see one successfully shut down, another sprouts up at an alarming rate.

As we’ve said before, the best protection from these scams is to hang up immediately if you receive a suspicious call. Here are Dell’s top five tips to help you avoid being scammed:

  1. Hang up! If an unsolicited caller pressures you to act quickly and give up sensitive personal and financial information to fix an issue and/or engages in threatening, aggressive behavior, that’s a sign of a scam.
  2. Never hand over your financial information to unsolicited callers who try to charge you to remove computer viruses, malware, or ransomware, even if they have specific information about your computer.
  3. Never pay for tech support services with any type of gift card or by wiring funds. Dell will never ask you for these forms of payment.
  4. Never visit unverified websites and never download and install software that unsolicited callers try directing you to.
  5. Never agree to give control of your computer to any unsolicited caller to fix an issue you did not report—despite how convincing they may sound.

For our U.S. and Canada customers: If you feel you may have been scammed, contact us immediately via our online form or call us toll-free at (866) 453-1742 Monday to Friday, from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. Eastern time.

For our customers outside the U.S. and Canada, please click here.

The battle to protect customers from these fraudsters is ongoing. As long as these scams continue to happen, we’ll continue to fight on your behalf.

John Scimone

About the Author: John Scimone

John Scimone serves as President, Chief Security Officer for Dell Technologies, where he leads the company’s global corporate security and resiliency programs. John’s responsibilities span the full spectrum of strategy, planning and operations, aiding the Dell Technologies businesses in the management of security risk across the physical and cyber domains. He is also charged with the advocacy of business resilience, including crisis management, business continuity and disaster recovery. Before joining Dell Technologies, John served as the Global Chief Information Security Officer for the Sony Group family of companies where he was responsible for building Sony’s first global information security and privacy organization and leading strategy, policy and operations. Prior to joining Sony, he also held a number of leadership positions at the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), including as Director of Security Operations for the Secretary of Defense's communications office, where he led the facility, personnel and cybersecurity programs. John formerly served as a member of a predecessor organization of U.S. Cyber Command, where he led the development of enterprise information security programs that protected information belonging to the DoD’s more than two million employees. John holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Georgia Institute of Technology.