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TechCentral Scams Call Center Scammers
An anonymous reader writes "At TechCentral, we get on average called at least once a week — sometimes far more often — by a friendly sounding Indian national warning us that our Windows computer is infected with a virus. The call, which originates from a call centre, follows exactly the same script every time. Usually we shrug them off and put the phone down, but this week we thought we'd humour them to find out how they operate. As this week's call came in, the first thing the "operator" at the other end of the line tried to establish was who was owner of the Windows computer in the household. I'd taken the call. It was time to have some fun. I told the scammer that I was the PC owner. He proceeded to introduce himself as "John Connor." I laughed quietly as I imagined Arnold Schwarzenegger's Terminator hunting down this scamster in the streets of Calcutta. Perhaps he should have come up with a more convincing name."
It's not harmless stringing them along like that. What you're really doing is giving them invaluable experience and training in responding to people who might simply be on the cusp of getting taken.
I kept the guy online, playing dumb, for about 15 minutes, until he finally gave up and told me to call Microsoft.
At which point, I asked him if I should tell them I was running Linux.
His reaction was priceless...and unprintable!
All the best scams make you feel as though they are helping you... Also, there are greater quantities of users who lack the standard knowledge to be able to see through these. That's the problem with making computing so main stream... it dilutes the depth of knowledge of the system.
Is this the weekly article about people who decide to "take the call" and "investigate" and "make fun of the scammers" ?
We've seen this MANY times...
I was taking my boys out bowling last summer when I got a call from my father telling me that "Windows" had called him and told him his computer was infected with a virus. I immediately told him it was a scam and to just hang up. At first, he didn't want to "just in case they were telling the truth", but he eventually hung up on them. They had gotten him to go to a website but not run a program. I told him that even opening a website could infect him and to treat his computer as if it was infected. Later, when I examined the website and his computer, I concluded that the website was a simple page that linked to remote access tools. These were perfectly valid tools (e.g. TeamViewer) from the company's own servers, but obviously being used for nefarious purposes. Running these tools themselves wouldn't have been a problem - except for the scammer on the other end of the connection. The fact that he stopped short of running their tool saved him.
The same scammers (or others running the same scam) called him back a few times since. My dad might not be the most computer savvy, but he does learn. He's not going to fall for the same thing twice and now that he knows it's a scam he berates the person for a few seconds before hanging up on them.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
The author is overselling himself. You haven't scammed a scammer until you've got them to send a bag man from Nigeria to a remote Scottish Island to collect your investment in cash.
I had one of these fookers once and decided to have a little bit of fun. I played myself off as an absolutely dumb user with very, very short term memory and kept asking the representative to repeat himself. I strung them along for 30 minutes before finally revealing that I was using Linux. I got yelled at and then they slammed the phone down. I hate these pond scum predators.
and you fucked it up
In my experience, most do 'semi' legitimate work, using normal tools for disinfection and optimization. These tools are things like hitman, MBAM, ccleaner, etc. Unfortunately, the techs do not seem very skilled, sometines causing damage, and more importantly they lie in a very convincing confidence game to get payment info and perform service. While I have yet to see anyone have extra fraudulent charges placed on them, the initial bill is fradulent given that the work never needed to be performed.
Also, if these "services" are so unethical as to lie to get you to pay, it is a small step to later using that payment information or selling it to third parties.
The worst one I saw is from a personal friend who called one of these services for assistance, paid 300 dollars for 3 years of remote assistance. One onthe to the day later, another company cold called him (he thought it was the first company). He allowed them remote access, and then when they wanted payment and he realized it was not the first company he asked them to disconnect. He was emotional and turned off his surge protector when they became pressuring and refused to disconnect. He left the room failing to realize it was a laptop and still on. The 'tech' then proceeded to delete most of the recently dated files in his user profile. These were very important files, and I was only able to recover about 85% with file recovery tools.
Unfortunately all these companies need to operate is a phone number and a simple VOIP system..maybe a quick templated website and domain. They can be set up in a very quick time, and exist outside of any willing jurisdiction to fight them. Education is the ONLY way at this time.
Silence is a state of mime.
Best way to annoy these guys is get them to call my grandma. She has 15 year old computer with 64MB ram that somehow runs xp. It literally takes 10 minutes to boot the pc. She also barely knows how to turn on the monitor. These guys were talking to my grandma for about 50 minutes when finally she said "maybe you should talk to my grandson he is in IT support", they promptly hung up after that.
She asked me if it was legit I said no, never ever listen to what these guys say because they will try to scam you and get your money. Unfortunetly sometimes she has a bad memory and 2 years later she fell to the exact same scam. I got her to call her credit card company to halt/cancel any payments, and I told her to buy a new pc because there was no way in hell I was reformatting a 64MB xp box. It took me over 2 hours just to backup documents.
A frustrating friend of mine who periodically calls me for computer help but will argue with any help I offer got nailed by one of these guys. Except that he argued with them the whole time and wouldn't follow their instructions. The only thing that ended up being changed was that he deleted his browser icon from his desktop.
A co-worker of mine told me that he called Netgear tech support for some help setting up a wireless router and his call got routed to these guys, or people almost exactly like them. From the description of the call, it looks/sounds like the exact same script/ploy. They asked him to run some command and said that the results of that command indicated that he had vulnerabilities on his machine. They'd need to remote in to install some stuff. He didn't fall for that last part, thankfully!
It's absolutely insane that a call to a well-known company's tech support line is getting sent to a scam like this. Yay outsourcing!
I usually get 1 of these calls per month.
I like to see how long it takes before they swear at me and hang up.
One time i started the conversation with "I like pie", and spent the next 20 minutes telling this guy about all the pies i have eaten in my life.
My favorite of all time was a lady with a very attractive voice. Every time she told me to do something, i made up a bullshit error message. She was sounding very confused when she finally asked me what version of windows i was using and i told her windows 19.
She tried to explain to me that the latest version of windows was windows 7, but about halfway through my story about how i wanted a very fast computer, so i built a time machine to go buy a new computer in the future, she started using some very colorful language, including a few words that i have never heard before, and i can swear in 17 languages.
Every time i get bored, i watch the phone and hope for another call from them.
Death has been proven to be 99% fatal in lab rats.
Here's some more interesting and informative articles, even:
https://blog.malwarebytes.org/...
http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...
http://www.howtogeek.com/18051...
Here is a 419 (Nigerian scam) back-and-forth. It is quite a bit funnier...
No, that's not true.
The people who work in the call centers are the same pool of talent, and in many cases may be doing both.
But they know they're scamming when they're doing it.
The problem is that they often don't know they're scamming when they're offering real support, because they're unqualified to know that in many cases.
I've seen documentaries about the people doing these things, and they absolutely know they're scamming people. And the reality is, they simply don't care.
Nobody could possibly NOT know that they're just ripping people off.
The important thing to remember is to make sure your parents and friends who aren't from a tech background understand that this is a real thing, and that they're being lied to. Because way too many people fall for it when the nice friendly person calls to say they're gonna fix your problem.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Most of these numbers likely come from scam sites claiming to offer free/cheap medical services. Once you've entered your information, they sell it to everyone interested.
The trouble is how to hit back at them. Normally the most that you can do is to waste their time & phone bill -- but your time is more precious than that. I wanted to try to get some of them to stop scamming and, to a limited extent, succeeded.
I had a phone call from one of these crooks claiming to be from Microsoft security center trying to tell me about a problem on my MS Windows machine (I run 100% Linux). After a few seconds I interrupted him and asked him if he was a religious man. He was puzzled and, after a couple of prompts, said 'yes'.
I told him that I was worried about his eternal soul ending up burning in the fires of hell because he was trying to steal money from people while he was alive. I asked if it was really worth it spending billions of years burning in hell for the sake of making some money in the few short years that he is alive. None of us is alive for many years compared to the billions of years in heaven or hell after we die.
I asked him to think about it before he went to sleep tonight. Where did he want to spend eternity ? Should he be doing the job that he is doing ? Is it worth it ? How will he be judged by God ? He was by now sounding a very different man from the one who started the 'phone call a few minutes earlier. Thanked me for being concerned about him. The call continued for another minute or so, me laying the eternity bit on very thick. Him getting quieter, before quietly thanking me again before the call ended.
I don't know what long term effect this will have on him, but hopefully he will decide that he ought to get another job. I did this a few times, some just laughed, then I got bored with the game.
http://itslenny.com/
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Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
A phone bot wouldn't work very well, but you could hire a call center. Maybe even the same call center.
Last century, I worked for a magazine sales company that did telephone soliciting. We loved it when people slammed down the phone because it meant no wasted time. The worst was when someone wanted to chat. One time a kid answered the phone and I asked for the dad. She said, "He's out in the garage under the car" and ran off to fetch him. It was a dillemma what to do next. Hang up? wait?. Another time the person on the other end kept repeating only the word yes during my sales pitch and then 5 minutes in switched to "can you please speak chinese". Even when I said "goodbye".
These days, I tell them I'm really glad they called and I need to move to the phone by the computer so I can purchase what they are selling. Then I set the phone down and go about what I was doing.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I took a call from one of these guys.
I happened to have a VM I use for testing up and running and I snapshotted it and figured I'd follow along with him just to see what he wanted done. This VM is on its own VLAN and behind its own firewall and public IP, but I kind of got cold feet about creds that could be on the machine or connectivity to my production LAN so I stopped before anything got installed (and I reverted to the snapshot, too).
Anyway, after I quit playing along I started to gently question who he said he was and the guy became really abusive and threatening, like he was going to save up for a plane ticket to fly to the US and beat me up or something if I didn't keep going. I was really kind of surprised at how far he took it.
At that point I figured dishing it out was fine, so I went full-on nasty with him and again I was surprised at his willingness to keep it up, especially considering I was pretty harsh.
The best revenge I heard was someone spinning up a VM of Windows 7, and having 2 folders on it: Personal, and Finances. The Finance folder was full of infected files, while Personal had some very nasty porn. Then he let the scammers get access to the VM, and watched them donwload the files.
Sounds like what I did to the "your car's warranty is about to expire" people about 3 months after I got my jeep. I figured they got a dump of people who had recently purchased a used vehicle. I was mostly polite but would string them along. With that Jeep there was no way they would ever offer a warranty (at the time it was 15 years old and only had 368,XXX miles on it) but would act interested. Eventually they would want vehicle information and telling them it is a '96 with that mileage they would inform me that it didn't qualify for a warranty. At this point I knew the conversation was over but once I did get it "escalated" to a "supervisor", the guy one phone over, and got to do it again.
I also like giving the phone to one of my children. It is down right hilarious to hear a 3 year old get fed up with these scammers, mine really likes to tell stories and eventually tell the scammer to "Stop talking now! I'm trying to tell you something!". My 6 year old is a much better communicator but is very inquisitive and will ask them all sorts of questions.
Time to offend someone
A while back I tried to turn the tables on a scammer who royally pissed me off.
I posted an ad looking for a roomate and I got interest from someone claiming to be relocating from spain with moving costs paid by her company. Sounded good to me....after a quick exchange I took down my ad and a day later got the bad news "I will be sending a money order, can you cash it and forward on the difference too...."
I immediately recognized the scam and put my ad back up, but I was mad.
So I said "Sure sounds good".... the money order came, I said "never got it, when is it coming?"....got another one.... then I decided to have fun with it.... I sent a url for some pictures on my webserver and asked questions that would requiore looking at them to answer...about the room of course.... soon as I had an IP, I looked it up and told "her"
"I have seen better fakes, you wont fool me" I told "her" and that I knew she was somewhere outside Lagos Nigeria. Suddenly she admitted to being a he, and had a new tune.... he was trying to recruit me. Too easy.
Pretty quickly it shaped up what he wanted...someone with a US addrss to remail packages. I would get a package of papers to send out, all I had to do was put them in envelopes, slap postage on, and that would be $500 for me, each time.
So I figured....no way I am helping this scammer who tried to scam me, but, lets see if I can scam him out of $500 by getting him to pay up front. He mentioned counterfit bills, so I was like yes, cool, I will take counterfit bills, then I can report you directly to the Secret Service oooh fun.....
in the end we could never work out a deal that sounded good to him and I was willing to burn him on so, it never happened. Oh well.....
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
This also explains using names like John Connor. You and I would be able to recognize the source of the name. It's much less likely that a senior citizen would, so it gives them a way to filter out the people least likely to fall for the scam.
Really? The original Terminator movie came out in 1984. People now in their 60s would have been about the same age as most of us here. Someone now in their 90s might not know about the movie, but I would bet at least as many people in their 60s and 70s know the name John Connor as do people in their teens and 20s.
Right, asking for remote control so they can poke around in your files, record you actions and initiate monetary transactions are things people do to each other every day. Bullshit, they know.
Me: "Does your mother know you are an Internet scam artist for a living?"
-click-
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
Touché! LOL
The reason is simple. They are poor people in the third world taking money from the rich people! Why should they care? They are sticking it to the man.
Just remember that next time you feel no sorrow sticking it to the man. You are the man to someone else.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
We received one of these calls a couple of months ago. My wife answered, and told them to speak to me. She handed me the phone, but I had no idea who it was when I said, "Hello?"
... but that's where the thought came from. So I just accused him of doing drugs and calling people. I figured the call would end quite abruptly, but it didn't. He said he wasn't doing drugs, and then almost apologized, fumbling all over himself. Now the call intrigued me.
All I can say is, when I heard the line about "I am calling you from Windows", I got angry. I figured you'd have to be doing drugs to believe that I would fall for this scam. Of course, HE didn't know that
"Yes you are. I know when someone is doing drugs and talking on the phone! And you sir, are doing drugs, and that is illegal!"
"Oh no sir, I am not doing that."
"Do you think I am lying to you!?!? I know what I'm talking about. How would your mother feel if she knew you were doing drugs!?"
"She would not like that."
"Well, do I have to call her? I will you know. I will call your mother and tell her that you are doing drugs and making phone calls for Windows!"
"Oh no sir, don't do that.
Really dude? At this point my wife is beginning to slide on to the floor. Anyway, I told him never to call me again and I hung up. Call didn't last a full minute, but it was absolutely hilarious. Never got a return call either.
Lou