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'Microsoft' Scam Callers Arrested After Years of Terrorising the Technically Challenged (gizmodo.co.uk)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Those shameless scammers that cold-call people pretending to be from Microsoft and demanding money after walking users through supposed problems with their computers? They're going down, it seems, with four people arrested in the UK for enabling the rip-off. City of London Police and Microsoft, the real Microsoft, have been working together for two years to trace the operators of the scheme, with the four people -- two from Woking and two from South Shields -- arrested on suspicion of fraud. Although the calls were found to originate from India, the investigators found that the scam was allegedly being run out of the UK, with the poor overseas callers working from scripts and, presumably, not really aware they're doing anything hugely wrong.
I got a phone call from someone claiming to be from Microsoft and that my computer had a virus. Which was... interesting to say the least. Considering that I never gave Microsoft my phone number in the first place. The guy on the phone line had the most ridiculous accent.
There is a fairly easy way to stop all kinds of scams like this.
Issue "Fraud cards" to LEO.
What, might you ask, is a fraud card? It's a special card that will stop a merchant account. Shut it down. Scammer calls a undercover LEO or their call is forwarded to them, LEO gives them the number, and as soon as it hits the card processor, it locks the merchant account and triggers a fraud investigation into that merchant account.
Full stop.
As for checking, that would be a tiny bit harder but not insurmountably so. Bit coin I doubt much could be done about it since the point of crypto currency is to avoid LE as much as possible.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
I held them captive for over an hour. I'm retired and have time for a little fun. The first time they called I told them I didn't have a "windows" key and I had a Linux computer that I built myself. That did not deter them. Finally I convinced them that what they wanted to do wouldn't work and they hung up. About a month later they called again and this time I decided to play along more -- I played stupid making them instruct me in almost everything. Finally that resulted in them asking me to download what turned out to be some remote monitoring/control software to turn over my desktop them. Except I did that in a Virtual Box which was running Windows 7 just for this purpose.
Eventually they got control of the desktop in the virtual machine, and I watched as they started to download other stuff to it. While they were trying to do this, I'd pause the virtual machine. After about a minute they'd ask if my machine was still working. I'd unfreeze it and move the mouse around and say "Yeah, it seems to be. But you said that my machine had a bad virus which made it run slow, so maybe that's what's going on." They'd move the mouse around some to see if it was still working and when they seemed content and start to move to open some webpage to download I'd pause it again. Hilarity ensued. They eventually called in their *high tech* guy who I'd play with as well, start cusing in Hindi to each other, and finally tell me that we had to start all over -- I'd reboot the virtual machine, making both of them wait. When it came back they'd have me download their remote desktop software again, and we'd start all over. Once again, I'd pause the virtual machine at just the right times, and I'll tell them I was hoping that they could fix my computer. Id be like, "Really guys, we have to fix my computer, it just freezes half the time, I'm sure it's the virus that you detected."
I gave up when the battery in my phone died. I figured over an hour with me kept them from possibly infecting some elderly person's machine. Unfortunately, they haven't called me in months, so I'm pretty sure I'm off the list that they use.