More than 3.3 million Americans will fall victim to fake PC support scams in 2015, Microsoft has said.

The scams involve calls from con artists who claim to work for Google, Microsoft or Facebook and tell victims their PC is riddled with viruses.

Those caught out typically pay a fee, often several hundred dollars, to clean up the bogus security problems.

In 2015, more than $1.5bn (£1bn) would be stolen by gangs behind the con,Microsoft predicted.

"We have seen a huge spike in these tech support scams," said Courtney Gregoire, a senior lawyer in Microsoft's digital crimes unit, in a blogpost.

Since May last year, Microsoft had dealt with more than 175,000 complaints about the bogus tech support calls, it said, adding that many of the scammers used very aggressive tactics to convince people to pay up.

The con artists also ask people to give them access to their PC over the net to help fix the non-existent problems.

But, said Ms Gregoire, this could expose victims to more problems than just handing over cash via bank cards. Read more here

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