Hawaii residents are among those being targeted by a phone scam in which the caller represents himself as being from Microsoft or a computer company and says he needs access to a person’s computer to remotely repair it.

Donna Taniguchi says she got a call on her land line at her Hawaii Kai home on the evening of March 22 from a man who said he was from "Windows Advanced Care." The man, who had an Indian accent, said her computer had been sending numerous error messages and needed to be corrected, she said.

Taniguchi soon became skeptical and ended the call without giving out any sensitive information.

Lt. John McCarthy of the Honolulu Police Department’s White Collar Crime detail said he has received calls from people, including an information technology professor, who have been victimized by the scam and lost money.

By allowing the perpetrators to download malware or spyware, "they can see everything you do," including passwords to sites where you do business and credit card information, McCarthy said.

Bruce Kim, director of the state Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs, said Taniguchi’s experience "sounds almost identical" to the faux-Microsoft phone scams that the company warned of last June, and is costing victims an average of $875.

Microsoft said criminals posing as computer security engineers call people at home, warning they are at risk of a computer security threat. They offer to provide free security checks and claim to represent legitimate companies. They use telephone directories to refer to their victims by name.

A Microsoft spokeswoman said, "The best way to avoid becoming a victim is by being aware of the threat."

Microsoft urges consumers to ensure their copy of Windows is genuine and fully up to date, which will guard against viruses, spyware and other malicious software.

Taniguchi said the caller provided detailed information. "He led me through several steps, which led me to a Windows log that displayed 25,000 errors," she said.

The caller also read a series of numbers that appeared on her computer, so it made it seem legitimate, she said.

She kept asking him to provide some kind of certification or authentication to verify where he was calling from.

"Finally when I heard him say something about accessing my computer, I said, ‘Whoa, we can’t go into any computer.’"

She said she has a lot of tax and credit card information on her computer.

Taniguchi called Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft, who told her they do not initiate calls. Microsoft also told her that the volume of errors was not unusual and that Windows 7 automatically corrects them.

McCarthy urges people whose computers may have been compromised to have their computers cleaned of any possible downloaded malware.

Microsoft said in a June 16, 2011, news release that the average amount of money stolen was $875, ranging from $82 in the U.S. to $1,560 (U.S.) in Canada, and that repair costs to victims’ computers was $1,730 on average, and up to $4,800 in the U.S.

For more information, visit the websites of the Federal Trade Commission (www.ftc.gov), Better Business Bureau (hawaii.bbb. org) and the DCCA (hawaii.gov/dcca).