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That Virus Alert on Your Computer? Scammers in India May Be Behind It (nytimes.com)
In India, a hub for tech support centers, a rise in scams forced Microsoft and the police to take action. From a report: You know the messages. They pop up on your computer screen with ominous warnings like, "Your computer has been infected with a virus. Call our toll-free number immediately for help." Often they look like alerts from Microsoft, Apple or Symantec. Sometimes the warning comes in a phone call. Most people ignore these entreaties, which are invariably scams. But one in five recipients actually talks to the fake tech-support centers, and 6 percent ultimately pay the operators to "fix" the nonexistent problem, according to recent consumer surveys by Microsoft.
Law enforcement authorities, working with Microsoft, have now traced many of these boiler rooms to New Delhi, India's capital and a hub of the global call-center industry. On Tuesday and Wednesday, police from two Delhi suburbs raided 16 fake tech-support centers and arrested about three dozen people. Last month, the Delhi authorities arrested 24 people in similar raids on 10 call centers. In Gautam Budh Nagar, one of the suburbs, 50 police officers swept into eight centers on Tuesday night. Ajay Pal Sharma, the senior superintendent of police there, said the scammers had extracted money from thousands of victims, most of whom were American or Canadian.
Law enforcement authorities, working with Microsoft, have now traced many of these boiler rooms to New Delhi, India's capital and a hub of the global call-center industry. On Tuesday and Wednesday, police from two Delhi suburbs raided 16 fake tech-support centers and arrested about three dozen people. Last month, the Delhi authorities arrested 24 people in similar raids on 10 call centers. In Gautam Budh Nagar, one of the suburbs, 50 police officers swept into eight centers on Tuesday night. Ajay Pal Sharma, the senior superintendent of police there, said the scammers had extracted money from thousands of victims, most of whom were American or Canadian.
Seriously? More like news for the nursing home.
I #%^&@$%ing hate those things, cause it invariably resutls in a paniced call from family urgently insisting on my help. Especially when it makes that obnoxious beeping noise.
Jail isn't good enough for these slime.
What a fucking buffoon. Genetic diversity is the key to our species survival. It's a shame that people have resorted to scamming instead of running honest businesses. This is not the fault of a country, but instead caused by runaway capitalism and a lack of morals to make the ends meet. Plenty of that everywhere.
The food is good, actually. Also, plenty of great minds and ideas have come from India. Don't damn a people because you are ignorant about them.
Warning! The heating ducts in your computer need cleaning. Your files are stuck in the dirt. Call us now!
It's easy to recognize these type of scammers.
They purport to be from Apple or Microsoft and offer to fix computer problems for payment.
Here's how you can distinguish these as fake calls:
Neither Apple nor Microsoft will ever fix any computer problem for any amount of money, ever.
Who knew!!! - a scam that uses a call center *might* come from India?! Let me say... "duh!" or as my kid says "dUuuUh!"
But I'm glad to see that authorities are getting better/faster at tracking them down and closing them (i.e. actually doing something about it).
One of the fascinating pieces of this is the technology used. The honeypots are quite sophisticated - including VoIP #'s that receive the calls. It is interesting what they "listen" for and how they correlate the calls. They track the ambient sounds to figure out which calls originate from the same call center (obviously the caller-id is fake). And then the honeypot PCs that are downloading the exploits are doing some cool things too.
We could use a whole story on just the technology. The podcast "Reply All" has covered some of it. Stories on the honeypot PCs is harder to find though (IMHO).
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The free market is not an American invention; it was created before the first sharp stone was traded for a spot by a warm fire. Likely the only human activities older are warfare and sex.
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
I love it when these guys call me with that ominous warning that I've been infected with a computer virus. I play the very basic, naive computer user (with a short term memory problem) and try to waste as much time with these guys as possible. I use an incredibly high pitched, slow, whiny voice and ramble on and on about things outside of computers. I do as much to frustrate them as I can. When it is finally played out, I reveal that I am running OpenBSD, they get pissed off, cuss met out, and then hang up. That's 30 minutes less that they can devote to stealing someone's identity and money and I get a good belly laugh.