Scam Alert: Fake Tech Support Calls Are Getting Smarter, With Help From AI

Security researchers are warning about a surge in tech-support scams that impersonate Microsoft or a company's own IT help desk, and several separate investigations this week point to the same pattern: generative AI is making these scams harder to spot than they used to be.

Dark Reading reports that researchers infiltrated one large-scale operation impersonating Microsoft that runs on a malicious traffic system tied to a Russian organization, abusing thousands of Cloudflare links to funnel victims toward fake support pages. In a separate pattern Dark Reading calls "a recurring social engineering pattern," attackers are simply calling company help desks directly and politely asking for account access, sometimes with AI assistance to sound more convincing on the call.

The Hacker News reports a related trend: generative AI is making fake login pages, the kind used to steal passwords once a victim is convinced to "verify" their account, easier to build and far more convincing than older, clumsier fakes.

Separately, attackers have also been found abusing Microsoft Teams' external chat feature to pose as IT support and deliver malware or ransomware directly inside a company's own chat tool, according to The Hacker News.

How to protect yourself

Real IT support almost never cold-calls or cold-messages you asking to remotely access your device or "verify" your account.
Be suspicious of any unexpected tech-support contact, whether it's a phone call, a pop-up, or a chat message, especially if it pressures you to act immediately.
Never give a stranger remote access to your computer because they called you first.
If you get a message claiming to be IT support through Teams, Slack, or email, verify it through a separate, known channel (like calling your actual IT department directly) before clicking anything.
Don't trust a login page just because it looks polished. Go to the real site directly instead of clicking a link in an unexpected message.