BoingBoing:
Security researchers at Stony Brook deliberately visited websites that try to trick visitors into thinking that their computers are broken, urging them to call a toll-free “tech support” number run by con artists that infect the victim’s computer with malware, lie to them about their computer’s security, and con them out of an average of $291 for “cleanup services.”
The researchers presented their findings — including recordings and transcripts of their interactions with the con artists — in a paper called Dial One for Scam: A Large-Scale Analysis of Technical Support Scams, which they presented at this year’s Network and Distributed Systems Security Symposium. Over the course of 60 calls, they found that the con artists all followed a narrow script. By backtracking the con artists’ connections to their PCs, the researchers were able to determine that the majority of the scammers (85%) are in India, with the remainder in the USA (10%) and Costa Rica (5%).
While the vast majority of us wouldn’t be scammed like this, it’s a good piece to pass along to those we know who may not be as technically proficient as we are.
It would be interesting to know how these kinds of scams cut across Mac/Windows users and different ages of users.
As I’ve gotten older I’ve gotten an increasing amount of phone spam and mixed into it is the odd call from India about tech support for my windows computer (which I don’t have).
Older people no doubt get hit more and fall prey more. I’d be interested in seeing statistics on how many Mac users fall for stuff like this vs. Windows users.
I was expecting to seeIndia, China, and Russia, not the US and certainly not Costa Rica. I wonder how accurate the traces were.
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I actually had one of these scammers call me. They told me that they were notified that I was having trouble with Windows (I have Macs, but whatever). I decided to play along for about 5 minutes just to see what they were having people do. Once I got bored with it I berated the caller until he hung up. Never been bothered since. That was the most fun I’ve had with a scammer.
I did the same thing one time. I had the guy on the phone for around 15 min while I pretended to play dumb. Same deal: he said my Windows computer (which I don’t own) had an issue and he wanted me to enter a command into the command prompt. I acted like I was really slow up until the point that he wanted me to run Teamviewer or whatever it’s called. At which point I said: Do you really think I’m going to let you into my computer? I’m a computer scientist and probably know far more about computers than you do! He got real irate at this point, cussed me out, hung up, called back again, cussed me out again! 🙂 I smiled knowing I took his time up keeping him from scamming someone else!
That sounds almost exactly like what I did. It was at the same point when I decided it was enough. Gave him a similar spiel about having a degree in computer science, not that naive, not even using Windows, etc. I wish he had cussed me out though. Then I’d have known I really pissed him off. 😉 Too funny.
Just read someone on a local facebook group that just got scammed out of ~$2500. After this same initial scam, the scammer had control of their computer and got their bank information. Called back and basically held them hostage until they wired the money.
Yeah it was awesome 🙂 Thanks for doing it as well! We save at least a few folks from getting scammed hopefully!
I am an IT systems administrator at a major university and I’ve gotten these calls at work.
I work from home one day a week and can pretty much guarantee I’ll get one call to my landline on that day.
Just skimmed the paper.
They had to get IRB (human subject studies) approval to contact the scammers, and guarantee that they wouldn’t “incur any risk to their emotional, psychological, or physical wellbeing.” which, frankly, is something I think about doing every time I interact with these criminals.
The global economy means your boiler-room call center can be anywhere!!
Or nowhere! Seemingly…