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Programmer Develops Phone Bot To Target Windows Support Scammers (onthewire.io)
Trailrunner7 quotes a report from On the Wire: The man who developed a bot that frustrates and annoys robocallers is planning to take on the infamous Windows support scam callers head-on. Roger Anderson last year debuted his Jolly Roger bot, a system that intercepts robocalls and puts the caller into a never-ending loop of pre-recorded phrases designed to waste their time. Anderson built the system as a way to protect his own landlines from annoying telemarketers and it worked so well that he later expanded it into a service for both consumers and businesses. Users can send telemarketing calls to the Jolly Roger bot and listen in while it chats inanely with the caller. Now, Anderson is targeting the huge business that is the Windows fake support scam. This one takes a variety of forms, often with a pre-recorded message informing the victim that technicians have detected that his computer has a virus and that he will be connected to a Windows support specialist to help fix it. The callers have no affiliation with Microsoft and no way of detecting any malware on a target's machine. It's just a scare tactic to intimidate victims into paying a fee to remove the nonexistent malware, and sometimes the scammers get victims to install other unwanted apps on their PCs, as well. Anderson plans to turn the tables on these scammers and unleash his bots on their call centers. "I'm getting ready for a major initiative to shut down Windows Support. It's like wack-a-mole, but I'm getting close to going nuclear on them. As fast as you can report fake 'you have a virus call this number now' messages to me, I will be able to hit them with thousands of calls from bots," Andrew said in a post Tuesday.
When your scam relies upon a script, it is easy to script a response that falls within the norms of what you're expecting out of your victims.
Queue the robot that checks the "I am not a robot" check box ... because it can.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
The summery says " 'you have a virus call this number now' messages" so it sounds like they are giving out a real number they expect the victims to call.
1984 was not supposed to be an instruction manual.
I was doing this 10 years ago with Asterisk phone server. get a phone call at the house, press *1 and it transfers them to telemarketer hell where it plays random human responses that are a lot better than his as I was looking for pauses in audio to respond, his is just random audio that is not responding to the audio coming in.
There was a asterisk guru that published all the goodies on how to do this over a decade ago and I used his code and modified it a bit. worked great and the longest I tired up a telemarketer was 2 hours.
about 4 years ago someone had a better one called "this is lenny" that emulated an old senile man and was recording the calls for everyones entertainment.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.