The Unstoppable 'Tech Support' Scam 312
Barence writes "A pernicious new type of scam is targeting British computer owners, reports PC Pro. The con is both fiendishly clever and ridiculously simple. The fraudster cold-calls the customer and tells them that Microsoft has detected a virus on their PC, then invites them to download a piece of remote-assistance software. No doubt reassured by the lines of indecipherable code flitting across their screen, the caller assures the customer they can make the virus vanish – but first, of course, they want payment. £185 to be precise. The spoof site behind the scam is approved by McAfee's Site Advisor and bears Microsoft logos, something which both companies have failed to act upon. Meanwhile, an assortment of British regulators have said there is nothing they can do to stop it."
Creative energy (Score:3, Interesting)
Same thing, but not techie (Score:5, Interesting)
They call old people telling them that their grandson is involved in some sort of a car accident, and need money for bail or pay the affected part for the damages, anyway they tell them that if they don't get the money his/her beloved grandson will be in jail for a long time
Then, they ask for the address to send a messenger to pick up the payment, in terms of cash, LCD TV, Blu-ray, etc.
And people fell for it... even the ones without a grandson
Re:Creative energy (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Wow (Score:1, Interesting)
It's not just the gullible, but also that easily pressured that are at risk.
The editor of one of the local papers (The Maidenhead Advertiser, I think, I'm not sure which.) got one of these phone calls a few months ago and played along with it a bit to see where it went - I remember reading about this in the editorial. When he stopped playing along (at one point pointing out that his machine was a Linux machine, and didn't even run windows), the guy on the other end started becoming pretty aggressive.
Unfortunately, there's a lot of folk about that don't know much about computers, and more that cave quickly to pressure. The elderly in particular are pretty vulnerable to this sort of stunt.
There's an ongoing problem in semi-rural areas with cowboy builders using a similar ploy - this is just the same conjob updated for the digital age, and using the wonders of international jurisdiction to make themselves even less likely to get caught. I expect it's a lot less profitable, but much lower risk.
Re:Duh (Score:5, Interesting)
The only thing you need to stop this unstoppable scam is for people to be unwilling to shell out a significant sum of money to some c**t who calls them up out of the blue.
I mean, £185, when you didn't know there was anything wrong with your computer in the first place? You'd need to have more money than brains to shell out for that.
Its no different to being told by a cold calling builder that your roof is sagging and needs several thousands of pounds of repairs done to make it safe. House owner coughs up, builder potters around in the attic for a day and legs it. One house owner that is a lot of money down for no reason other than fraud.
Unfortunately, these seem to be being reported in the news all too often today :(
Re:Scum (Score:5, Interesting)
They disincentivize ignorance and stupidity by making it more painful, just like those natural pests disincentivize improper sanitation./quote?
Yet the only reason why we care to disincentivize ignorance and stupidity is because those scammers exist. Your logic is viciously circular. They need to exist to protect people from themselves?
I'm glad you raised this point. It's a good one, to be sure.
Being wise and savvy and seeking understanding is the natural state of human beings. The widespread ignorance and stupidity is what I might call "unnaturally natural". The proof is that by not viewing ignorance and gullibility as problems in need of correction, people leave themselves vulnerable to this type of scam. The scammers do not create this vulnerability. They merely capitalize on it. They see that something is out of order and that this creates room for them to operate. Otherwise their dubious "enterprise" would never get off the ground.
The ignorance and stupidity is a disease state. The scammers are the disease that can thrive in the environment of that disease state. They are symptoms, not the actual problem. It's absurdity itself to say that the only reason to eschew ignorance and stupidity is because these scammers exist. Have you no concept of how much better our world would be if ignorance and stupidity were not such powerful forces in shaping it?
The personal shortcomings that scammers exploit go far, far beyond computing. They also play important roles in politics, the economy, interpersonal relationships, you name it. It just so happens that computing provides a convenient entry point for that ignorance and stupidity to come under attack since it is generally encouraged in other realms like politics.
Run text (Score:2, Interesting)
My mother-in-law had a call like this last year - they told her to type "temp spyware" and "prefetch unwanted" into the Run box on her PC to prove it was infected..
Re:Scum (Score:3, Interesting)
In fact I'd say that the public schools bear more responsibility than anyone else for the widespread ignorance and gullibility that these scammers feed on. A truly tough-minded population familiar with critical thinking, logic, and argumentation would not so easily fall for these scams. They also wouldn't support anything our politicians of today are pushing for. So you see that'd be really inconvenient for our increasingly centralized society *spits*.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm out of mod points, but the above is very insightful. I can relate seeing, on many occasions, where a dead simple UI, no more complex than say that of an ATM, becomes utterly confounding just because it's being presented with a PC in sight. In one case: as long as the PC was hidden, and the UI was accessed via a touchscreen --- everything was fine. As soon as mouse, keyboard and the PC case became visible, people would say that "something broke" and that I should bring it back to the "way it was before". This was a big eye opener when it comes to usability: users are not rational. Not at all.
Our system says "don't go there" (Score:4, Interesting)
The actual site mentioned is thenerdsupport.com [thenerdsupport.com]
I ran them through our SiteTruth system. Here's what comes out. [sitetruth.com] "Rating: "Site ownership unknown or questionable. No Location. ... This certificate identifies the domain only, not the actual business.
No street address found on the site."
Compare the SiteTruth results for Geek Squad. [sitetruth.com] Street addresses found, found in the US business directory, found in Open Directory.
It's not that hard to sort out the phony business sites from the real ones. You have to check business databases, not just the Web, for business legitimacy. If you just look at the web, you get bogus results like this: McAfee SiteAdvisor [siteadvisor.com]: "We tested this site and didn't find any significant problems." The site itself doesn't try to attack the user, so McAfee says it's good to go.
Re:Creative energy (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Can't Do Much (Score:4, Interesting)
Such scams are at least tried. I've had two calls to my house in the last year telling me that my car's warranty is due to expire and if I want to continue it I have to renew before the expiry date or it will cost more then twice as much to renew after that date. Would I like to renew now by card over the phone? I do not own a car and have never owned a car.
On both occasions I asked played concerned for a moment and asked "which of the cars?" at which point they hung up - obviously anyone asking any questions just makes them run as they don't have any real data other than name and phone number. Once you ask a questions about something they should know if they were who they hope the intended victim thinks they are their "cover" is blown, but they only need a few people who are not cynical/careful enough to check details in order for the operation to be profitable and said victim is no wiser until they try claim on the warranty by which time the scammers have long gone and covered their tracks.
Re:Scum (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:And ... (Score:2, Interesting)
- They only call out as call backs to customers
Note that this isn't *entirely* true ;-)
I used to often work evenings and folks would call and complain that their cable connection(and thus internet as well) would be out. Policy was that for a singular problem we'd drop by within 2 working days but in the case of an outage where multiple homes were affected we'd drag some poor mechanic from behind his 'taters and be on site within 2 hours.
Obviously every customer would loudly proclaim that the entire street was having issues, so at one point I devised a devious plot consisting of calling 1 or 2 random neighbours to inquire about the state of their cable signal :)
Re:Scum (Score:3, Interesting)
It's a bit easier to act like weeding people out based on how they fall victim to crime is a good thing when you are a hundred percent sure that you wouldn't fall for the crime discussed. On Slashdot, people act like they are smarter than crime because they don't fall for phone scams and banner ads but maybe they would fall victim to bullets that weren't aimed at them but.. oh shit look you walked in the wrong area at the wrong time of night! Well aren't you glad those nice guntoting thugs taught you a valuable lesson? Plus so much criminal shit happens to people who don't deserve it, but hey anyone dumb enough to not know how to use a computer (aka has a different focus in life then me) deserves to get ripped off.
Re:Scum (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't know where these people are going to school. I went to a public school in the USA, went to a decent university, grad school, and now job that actually utilizes critical thinking skills. I, and my high school friends, didn't turn out to be the fools that you would assume that we would be by going through public schools at each step. It's more likely that being ignorant is the easy way out and that's what people would rather choose instead.
I'm grateful that you and some others are raising such good points in this discussion. I usually enjoy participating in Slashdot but not usually this much. For that I am glad, for this is truly stimulating.
What I would point out here is a particular disconnect. My high school also taught some critical thinking skills, though in narrow and very specific applications. By that I mean, they were utilized only at the request of some kind of authority figure. There always had to be a "gun to the head" in the form of a failing grade or an angry boss at work. This is still a passive approach to life.
My same fellow students who took the same courses I did were still extremely suggestible and susceptible to the propaganda techniques of advertising. Despite good grades in any classes that discussed critical thinking, they still valued conformity much more than individualism. That tells me they were able to mechanically go through the motions but did not embrace critical thinking in any real way. They did not take it to heart and see its tremendous value. They merely paid lip service to it in order to appease a teacher or a boss.
It's the difference between passively waiting for a teacher or other person to decide to show you a skill, versus seeking it yourself for its own sake. It's the folly of believing that critical thought and being tough-minded is all about passing a class or doing a job. It's a failure to comprehend the true meaning of those things, seeing only their surface in the form of utilitarian application, a memorized series of steps, a procedure, something you are required to do rather than something you gladly embrace.
Most of all, the majority of my fellow students viewed education as something they received from school. They did not see schooling as a supplement to their own personal quest to better themselves even when no one is looking. In short, they were still dependent on others to show them how to think rather than discovering it for themselves by hungering and thirsting for it. That dependence is exactly what public schools want to instill, even while they teach the skills that could otherwise overcome it. In that way they make a sort of mockery of those skills.
Ignorance is not really the easy way out; it just has a certain allure because it involves less up-front effort. I tell you the truth, the avoidable suffering that the ignorant experience is far worse than the effort of bettering oneself. So are the network effects on society when you have so many ignorant people.
Re:This is actually what happens (Score:2, Interesting)
Similar experience here - they called, got me to run event viewer. I lied and told them there were only Info and Warning messages - but he still exclaimed "OMG! you have a virus!" it was when he said "Now, it's very important - do not click anywhere or your computer will break" that I couldn't hold back and gave him a rant at how ludicrous he was being and asking what he's trying to scam. They hung up.
Of course, warnings and errors are completely run of the mill in Event Viewer (mine are mostly the DHCP service noting that I lose my address whenever I suspend my laptop)
Re:Scum (Score:2, Interesting)