North Yorkshire Police has praised the actions of a local post office for alerting to them to a recent fake Microsoft fraud.

Staff in Easingwold Post Office noticed that, in the space of 24 hours, they received the same type of request from two different customers to transfer a significant amount of money via a money transfer service to an unknown account.

They refused to process both transactions and used the banking protocol to contact North Yorkshire Police to alert them of their concerns on Wednesday 4 April and Thursday 5 April.

On both occasions the fraudsters had called their victims claiming to be from Microsoft and stated that their computers had been infected with a virus and that they could help to fix it.

Commonly, the fraudster convinces the victim to install a remote monitoring program called TeamViewer which allows the fraudster to gain access to the victim’s computer.