Microsoft Dumps Partner For Fake Support Call Scam

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has broken its relationship with one of its Gold Partners, after it discovered that the partner was involved in a scam involving bogus tech support calls. India-based Comantra is said to have cold-called computer users in the UK, Australia, Canada and elsewhere, claiming to offer assistance in cleaning up virus infections. The calls used scare tactics to talk users into opening the Event Viewer on Windows, where a seemingly dangerous list of errors would be seen. This 'evidence' was used to trick innocent users into believing they had a malware infection, and for Comantra to gain the users' confidence. Duped users would then give permission for the support company to have remote access to their PC, and hand over their credit card details for a 'fix.' Security firm Sophos says that internet users have been complaining about Comantra's activities for over 18 months, and it has taken a long time for Microsoft to take action. Comantra's website still retains the Gold Certified Partner logo, although their details have been removed from Microsoft's database of approved partners."

Comments

Maybe the I.T. guys are right after all.

[pro151]

90% of all users are idiots.

Re:Maybe the I.T. guys are right after all.

[bratwiz]

90% of all users are idiots.

And the other half are no brainiacs either!

Re:Maybe the I.T. guys are right after all.

[PerformanceDude]

Actually, you need to take your corporate IT hat off for a second. The people who fall for this scam are typically people who didn't grow up with computers. Your mum and dad (now maybe in their sixties), who only use a computer to type the odd letter, Skype the grandkids and maybe look for old friends on Facebook. They do not have access to tech support and mostly their computers have been bought in a standard configuration with just the few things they need installed.

Those people (I can't get myself to call them users) have been told by their kids, the banks and everyone else they trust to understand computers, that viruses are a real threat and that if you get a computer virus it is really bad and awful things can happen to you (identity theft, damaged computer, having your broadbad costs skyrocket from a spam-virus using up your allowance etc.).

I know some of these people are scared to even start a web browser for any site that they have not specifically been told they can trust.

So, when one of these scam (scum) artists calls up and tells them that they have a bad virus - their immediate reaction is fear and confusion. When the scammer then offers to "fix" the problem, they gladly agree to hand over a relatively modest amount (around $150 usually) and let the scammer go ahead. Sadly, once their credit card details have been handed over, it is normally not the end of it.

How do I know all this? Because it happened to the nice old man down the street. He was almost in tears when he told me how he'd gone ahead and let the scammer take almost half his weekly pension money. It also happened to a nice elderly couple that are friends of my parents and to the man who mowes my lawn to supplement his pension. Nice, normal and not even that gullible people - just people who are not geeks.

We (the geeks) actually have a responsibility to educate those poor people rather than calling them idiots. Nothing beats a scammer better than being forewarned.

Re:Maybe the I.T. guys are right after all.

[black3d]

That's a bit harsh. They don't have our degree of expertise, but everyones knowledge is generally specialised. "The IT Guys" are just jaded, because they've chosen a profession where they have to deal with that lack of knowledge in their specific area, on a daily basis. It's why I got out of tech support after a couple of years - I didn't like dealing with that. Meanwhile, those "IT guys" have a very limited field of expertise, and are usually unskilled at just about everything NOT computer-related. This doesn't make everybody idiots, it just states the obvious fact that everyone's knowledge is specialised. Ignore the jaded jerks. If their joy comes from irrationally insulting strangers, they're twats.

Re:Maybe the I.T. guys are right after all.

[Eraesr]

But the problem here isn't computer savvyness. The problem here is people trusting a stranger on the phone coming up with some vague story about their computer. Anyone with half a brain would (should at least) be suspicious of that, computer knowledge or not.

Re:Maybe the I.T. guys are right after all.

[drinkypoo]

We (the geeks) actually have a responsibility to educate those poor people rather than calling them idiots.

I choose to educate these people by calling them idiots.

The basic principles behind computing, or your car, or basically anything else in your life are not that complicated, and understanding them bears immediate dividends. Most people, however, willfully avoid learning anything about any of these things, to their detriment. However, what I find more ridiculous is that people are accepting calls out of the blue from J.Random Idiot and believing everything they're saying. It's almost like their parents failed to raise them to make critical decisions or something.

The meek shall inherit the earth, but they shall have to ask the geek to run it for them. And the cycle begins anew...

Sophos is a security firm?

[F-3582]

Seriously, they should start thinking about changing business after this.

Re:Sophos is a security firm?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a reference to famous bug called the 'f00f' bug, if you've ever looked in /proc/cpuinfo on an x86 Linux system, you might have noticed it mentioned. Intel published a number of workarounds that OS vendors can use to prevent it, so most operating systems check on boot whether the system is affected, and then implement Intel's suggestions as necessary (if it says "f00f_bug: no" that means Linux determined that you were not affected, and the workarounds were not necessary).

The f00f bug was a malformed encoding of the cmpxchg8b (compare and exchange 8byte) instruction with a nonsense four byte r32 operand, however, cmpxchg8b is well known to programmers who don't specialise in security as well, as it's important for use in low-level locking primitives.

As you probably execute thousands of cmpxchg8b instructions every second, I don't know why it would look shady. Perhaps you're not a programmer and thought it looked like a random combination of digits and letters, but that would be ironic from someone called L4t3r4lu5, no? :-)

Re:about freaking time!

[Anaerin]

Same here. They called me and my in-laws, claiming to be from "Microsoft Computer Support". I told them it was a federal offence to falsify caller ID information (The call came from "1-000-000-0000"). They hung up fairly quickly.

This is News to Them?

[segedunum]

I've had countless calls from various companies based in India saying they're calling on behalf of Microsoft who have detected a virus on one of my computers and are offering to 'clean' it up. I don't even say anything now. The phone gets put straight down. It's been getting steadily worse these past few months.

Re:Outsourcing

[Lisias]

That's what we get for tolerating outsourcing to foreign countries.

In a first thought, as a potential beneficiary of USA software development outsourcing, I would protest about your statement.

But then I remembered when we, on a previous job of my on an embedded gadgets for automobiles industry, outsourced some device drivers to a certain country, well known (now) for some not so orthodox behavior on the Software Industry.

Well, there's nothing else to say except I second that....

Re:TIB

[Lisias]

they were rude

Once upon a time, I had Indian teammates working with me.

They were not rude (normally), au contraire, but their verbal politeness did not, at least on English, cope with ours. We took some time to learn how to communicate each other with (what both sides agreed it was) courtesy.

I take a even worst time with Chinese teammates over MSN conferences (we could not manage to understand our English accents! :-D). Without visual assurance, we never know for sure when we're making a praise for a job well done, or making a joke on a stupid mistake we did! X-P (even worst, sometimes what we thought was a stupid mistake was a well job done not understood at first glance).

Our texts, sometimes, were padded with "(this is a joke)" or "(this is a praise)". I remember at least one "(I still deciding if this is a joke or not)", but I don't remember who shoot that...

Looking in distance, it was hilarious. But at that time, not so much... :-)

Hahahha

[Triklyn]

If you follow a link in the article to the original report, you'll find tons of comments about the domain names and the scam... and a few gems interspersed about the companies being so legit and helpful, in pretty broken english, by incredibly generic usernames. Those are some seriously hardcore scammers.

Re:Thank you Microsoft

[black3d]

Okay, but extend that "need" into "want", and suddenly you'll find most PC gamers can't manage at all with a simplistic Chrome-like OS. If you exclude "business" users from your percentage, you'll find your target audience for a simple idiot-proof OS on home PCs dwindles significantly. Sure, they're still out there. And I wholly support giving grandma Ubuntu (or even something simplier), Firefox and Thunderbird, and letting her have at it! She doesn't need to do anything else, so anything else is just bloat. But it's not 75-80% of the home user market that applies to. I doubt it's even 50%. This is why Windows is still going strong (well, that, and the fact that it comes pre-installed on most PCs).

Most folks I know don't buy pre-made PCs, but get friends to price up and build them for them. They're "more power" machines, not "email and messenger" machines. Sure, there's still a market for K.I.S.S, but as each successive generation gets more tech-clued, folks want more options, not less. As the tablet-OS-on-desktops is beginning to take off, we may see this plateau and diverge into two markets - but I don't think you'll find the simple OS market anywhere near as high as 80% for home users - at least not for their primary PC. "Entertainment centers", sure.

So in the camp of folks who do want a more powerful, diverse OS, why WIndows instead of Linux? Linux isn't ready yet. It's at an ideal point as a Simple OS - see Grandma example above. But it's by no means ready as a replacement for Windows for the folks who want to use the additional functionality, but don't want to have to learn how to tinker with the OS. Thesedays, one should never have to see a command prompt to do ANYTHING, in normal usage. Retaining a command prompt for common usage is holding back the Linux desktop from widespread adoptance. There are too many common, complex functions in Linux, which are simple in Windows.

Agreed - there's far too much to Windows. But disagree that that fact has virtually any impact on the user. There's no aspect of the interface or interactions I have with the Windows OS that are any faster in Linux. When I finish this text and hit Preview, it won't happen faster in Linux. When I then close the browser and switch across to my Steam window, it wouldn't happen any faster in Linux. There's no distinguishable speed differential on modern-day 64-bit, 8-core PCs.