Is Someone Pretending to Be Sage 100 Support? Here's What to Watch For.
By Shannon Stanley, Sage 100 Consultant — Ardent Consulting
A fraudulent Sage 100 support number is showing up in Google search results. Here's how the scam works, what to watch for, and what to do if someone in your organization has already called it.
If your company runs Sage 100, there's a scam making the rounds that you need to know about. We've seen it hit two clients in the past two months, and both times it nearly worked.
Here's how it happens.
An IT person runs into a common Sage 100 workstation error: "Unable to Connect to Server. The server xxx is reachable, but it is not accepting requests on the TCP/IP Socket given. Most likely the Application Server Service is not running on the server.”
It looks serious. Instead of calling their Sage consultant, they Google "Sage 100 support" and a fraudulent number shows up in the search results. They call it, believing they've reached Sage.
The person on the other end asks to remote into the server. Once they're in, that person pastes a wall of alarming-looking text into Notepad, including sync errors, corruption warnings, a specific percentage of files "damaged," and error codes, and sends the .txt file to the client. It's designed to look technical and scary. (And it is.)
The .txt file indicates that the customer has a data synchronization error and then quotes a fee to fix it, which runs in the thousands of dollars, depending on the service level.
You can see an image of the alarming error message below, which one of our clients sent us.
But, of course, it's not real.
There is no data corruption, and the error codes are faked (and they look like dollar amounts). The entire document is fabricated.
In both situations we ran across, the original error-message trigger was a simple port-number misconfiguration on a new workstation, which is something your Sage consultant can fix in just a few minutes.
At each company, the Controller felt something was off and called Ardent (their Sage consultant) before paying.
Which was exactly the right thing to do.
What to Do If This Happens to You
The original error message our clients saw was legitimate. In both cases, it was a real Sage 100 message that comes up when a new workstation isn't configured correctly. While this specific error message is what triggered the scam in both cases, we suspect any unfamiliar Sage error could have the same result because the real vulnerability begins when someone at the company Googles "Sage 100 support."
Therefore, if anyone on your team, including IT, sees an error they don't know how to address, the first step should be to contact your Sage consultant.
To repeat: Don't search for a Sage support number online. When you contact Sage through official channels, they'll usually just redirect you to your Sage reseller anyway.
Here are a few rules we recommend sharing with your team:
The fraudulent "Sage support" phone number appearing in search results is 1-800-870-0422. If anyone in your organization has already called this number, contact your Sage consultant right away.
Don't let anyone remote into your server unless your Sage consultant has authorized it.
If something feels off, trust your instincts. Call your Sage consultant immediately.
