Slashdot Mirror
Court Shuts Down Alleged $120M Tech Support Scam
wiredmikey writes A federal court has temporarily shut down and frozen the assets of two telemarketing operations accused by the FTC of scamming customers out of more than $120 million by deceptively marketing computer software and tech support services. According to complaints filed by the FTC, since at least 2012, the defendants used software designed to trick consumers into believing there were problems with their computers and then hit them with sales pitches for tech support products and services to fix their machines.
According to the FTC, the scams began with computer software that claimed to improve the security or performance of the customer's computer. Typically, consumers downloaded a free, trial version of the software that would run a computer system scan. The scan always identified numerous errors, whether they existed or not. Consumers were then told that in order to fix the problems they had to purchase the paid version of the software for between $29 and $49. In order to activate the software after the purchase, consumers were then directed to call a toll-free number and connected to telemarketers who tried to sell them unneeded computer repair services and software, according to the FTC complaint. The services could cost as much as $500, the FTC stated.
According to the FTC, the scams began with computer software that claimed to improve the security or performance of the customer's computer. Typically, consumers downloaded a free, trial version of the software that would run a computer system scan. The scan always identified numerous errors, whether they existed or not. Consumers were then told that in order to fix the problems they had to purchase the paid version of the software for between $29 and $49. In order to activate the software after the purchase, consumers were then directed to call a toll-free number and connected to telemarketers who tried to sell them unneeded computer repair services and software, according to the FTC complaint. The services could cost as much as $500, the FTC stated.
your windows computer has a virus" But I don't run windows, I have Linux.
My guess is that someone important was scammed OR the money got to the level of "important" for the banks. This has got to be one of the easiest things that the FBI could track and bust.
A related question, though. As anyone who's ever done support knows, the average computer is awash with problems. How different would the situation have been if the scan had been real instead of a scam?
Greed.
There is/was a popular scam that involved getting people to look at their Windows error log in order to convince them that they needed "help." It was quite effective because the average user easily accepts that errors are the same as problems.
My mom and a co-worker were both targets of this particular scam. The target would receive an unsolicited phone call from someone who made the target think the caller was associated with Microsoft who would show them the errors on their computer. The caller would then try to convince the target to let the caller have access to their computer. Neither of the targets had a clue that the errors they were seeing were normal and it could have gone quite badly for them. Both my mom and co-worker declined to let the caller do anything on their computer saying that they had someone who handled this kind of stuff for them (me.) Naturally I received a not quite panicked call shortly after and was able to reassure them it was only a scam and their computer was fine, but I think either could have been victimized if they hadn't had someone they know and absolutely trust to handle serious computer issues for them.
My company gives me a phone and it's an iPhone so I can give good tech support to the boss who "needs" an iPhone. Because it is a company phone, I can't jailbreak it or hack around on it in good conscience, but it chafes. I can't put whatever software I want on it or make it work the way I would prefer because Apple makes their customers a deal: trust us completely and we'll make your device work the way it should.
As much as it chafes me to deal with such a walled garden, I can't help but think it's the way consumer products need to be designed. The harder it is for my mom and co-worker to mess up their device, the less time I have to spend fixing it.
With that background in mind, I can't help but hope MS goes more and more down the road toward building in their own computer security because it removes the incentive to get an anti-virus package which has to "solve" issues that aren't really problems in order to appear useful.
If the scammers were just a little less greedy, they could have used the same approach to sell actual anti-virus packages. I think most anti-virus companies are just slightly less greedy or they'd be running the same scams.
Greed is the thin greasy line that separates "legitimate" anti-virus vendors from criminals. For decades I've told people they needed antivirus and security software despite knowing the big vendors introduce a new set of problems, because it was necessary. Now MS is building it in and I can tell them to just use the free MS software that's built in and I get less support headaches. I'm sure it's hurting the AV vendors, but I've had to fix too many problems they caused to feel much sympathy.