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According to the survey, some victims paid using bitcoin, which experts warn is virtually impossible to recover. MORE THAN 200 COMPLAINTS A DAY Microsoft, headquartered in Redmond,
Washington, receives about 78,000 complaints a year from victims of tech-support scams. That works out to about 6,500 a month — or more than 200 every day. While the complaints are half what
they were in years prior — about 156,000 annually — keep in mind that Microsoft isn't the only computer firm whose identity has been hijacked by scammers bent on theft, identity theft
and other wrongdoing. Meantime, as Schrade notes, criminals now are adapting with “more sophisticated tactics or ploys” than in years past. Scammers once hit up consumers in cold calls, and
moved on to using computer pop-up ads, she says. Today there's more in their toolbox: affiliate marketers, who deliver professional-looking pop-ups to prompt people to contact
fraudulent call centers; scam attempts using email; and use of social engineering and search-engine optimization. Plus, the perpetrators are sharing resources with other bad actors: leads,
call-center referrals and payment processors, she says. In a statement to AARP, Schrade highlighted the need for consumer education. “We know that the best way for people to protect
themselves is to learn how to recognize the scams, so we have been focused on educating consumers,” she said, “and appreciate AARP's dedicated efforts to educate its members." The
new findings are in Microsoft's 2021 Global Tech Support Scam Research, which follows similar surveys in 2018 and 2016. Recent reports to the Federal Trade Commission are another reason
boomers and others should not breathe a sigh of relief. Complaints of tech-support scams to the U.S. consumer protection agency picked up in the first three months of 2021 after a few years
of decline. From January through March, there were 32,340 tech-scams complaints, and if that rate holds there will be 129,360 for all of 2021. In 2020, the first full year of the pandemic,
there were only 98,122 tech-scam cases, down from 108,318 in 2019, 148,539 in 2018, and 154,826 in 2017.