Hello, this is microsoft, your computer has a virus...

[silicon_toad2000]

A few months back I got a call one evening which was clearly a virus call centre scam; you know, the ones that call you out of the blue, tell you your PC is infected with all sorts of nasties and offer to fix it for you? Or maybe you don’t know, which of course is why these scams have been going on for quite some time and are still very active today.

Fortunately I did know about such things so rather than summarily dismissing them with a level of disdain I normally reserve only for telemarketers, I recorded the audio of the call right up until the point where they were ready to take control of my PC. I published the whole episode in my post titled Anatomy of a virus call centre scam.

But I was left wondering; what exactly were they going to do to my PC once they got remote control? Try and squeeze some cash out of me for “fixing” things? Install their own variant of “antivirus”? Or just plain old enslave my PC into being part of a botnet? So I decided to find out by letting them do whatever they wanted whilst recording the audio and the screen so the entire experience could be shared.

I've spent over half an hour on the phone with these guys before explaining that my computer was running on linux which might explain why the windows key didn't do anything and why they couldn't direct me to the event log, which results in them asking what linux was.

This guy went all the way with the scammer to see what they were up to and recorded the lot.
There's a video of the recording and a text summary for those who don't want to sit through the 80 minute video.

Well worth reading through at least and maybe forward to freinds and family.

http://www.troyhunt.com/2012/02/scamming-scammers-catching-virus-call.html

[Ace]

lol i had same thing i call em out thay soon put phone   down on you when you say i run linuxs  not windows and i asked let me teamview them instead there scum praying on the old/  non tech people to  con money  out off you hope thay get  found  and well  .......    we  can only hope

[GhostShip]

I was installing an application the other day that declared it was "free", however alarm bells started when the firewall told me it was dailing out before I had ticked the any of the options for installing displayed, so being a suspicious guy I too logged the IP and let things roll on a bit further and by repeatedly making variations in the install I was able to see that whatever option I chose it wanted to contact one single web site, looking over the web site one thing jumped out to me in their terms and conditions, £50 an hour "support fee", so the scam was pretty simple, offer a product for free download, make sure that the installer says theres some problem or other (even if theres not) and then offer to "help" the poor chump trying to install the software and I bet its just relabled open src software anyway.

Of course I simply dumped the whole sorry mess but it seems the motto is dont trust anything to do as it claims unchecked , get that firewall in place and be alerted when the next scammer or their malware tries it on.

[silicon_toad2000]

free software lives next door to sourceforge

[MinersLantern]

Much like email, if I get a phone call from somewhere im not expecting, its a free country. They are free to eat the answering machine and im free to totally ignore their existance.

One of these days im going to do my own PBX.

Then strange callers can get answered by Pizza Hut, Amway, the IRS or something before the real phone even rings.  lol

If only the entire rest of the worlds population would act that way... then all these people would be forced to get a real job... at Pizza Hut, Amway or the IRS.

In short dont even waste your time talking with people on the phone. Unless you find great amusement at leading them on. Then its OK.  lmao