In the first such UK conviction, a Luton man has been ordered to pay compensation to victims of a scam that phoned victims to claim their PCs were infected with a virus

A man who ran a "Microsoft support scam" which fooled people into paying for unneeded antivirus software that was free has been given a suspended jail sentence, and ordered to pay thousands of pounds in compensation and fines.

Mohammed Khalid Jamil, 34, from Luton, hired people in an Indian call centre who then phoned up people in the UK, pretended to be from Microsoft, and claimed that there was a problem with the victim's computer - which they would "confirm" by getting them to look at a perfectly harmless Windows program which records machine events.

The cold-callers would then sell the victims antivirus software that was available for free from Microsoft's website, and install it using remote access to the victim's computer. People were typically charged between £35 and £150, and many of the victims were elderly.

Jamil was sentenced to four months in prison, suspended for 12 months, and fined £5,000. He was also ordered to pay £5,665 in compensation to his victims, and £13,929 in prosecution costs. The National Trading Standards eCrime Team, which coordinated with local trading standards bodies, said that Jamil's company Smart Support Guys "duped a large number" of Britons into handing over money, with their computers left in a worse state than before the intrusion.

Lord Harris, chairman of the National Trading Standards Board, said: "This is a landmark case, as we believe it may be the first ever successful prosecution of someone involved in the 'Microsoft scam' in the UK."

He called it an "important turning point for UK consumers who have been plagued by this scam, or variants of it, for several years." He said the verdict was "a stark warning to anyone else doing it that they can be caught and will be prosecuted."

The Guardian revealed in July 2010 that teams in India were running the scam out of call centres, and that it was also being used against English-speaking people in other countries including the US and Australia. Though the Metropolitan Police took action against a number of "support" websites used for the scams, they tended to be recreated in days.

In October 2012 the US Federal Trade Commission froze the accounts of a number of people related to six tech support scams, which appeared to slow down the number of scam calls there. None of them included Jamil or his companies.

Jamil pleaded guilty at York Crown Court to unfair trading by allowing his staff to make false claims regarding computer support services. He was previously a director of a similar company called Onlinepcmasters.com, founded in August 2009; Luton trading standards warned him about its conduct in 2010. That company was dissolved in September 2013. Smart Support Guys was only formally incorporated in February 2014.

Passing sentence, Recorder Baird said that the matter "passes the threshold for a custodial sentence" and that there were aggravating features including the 2010 warnings and the sending of false satisfaction emails.

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