Virus Alert Scammers Offices Raided

[engine]

You'll be pleased to hear that some of these fake virus alert scammers had their offices raided this week. I'm sure this is only the tip of the iceberg, but it's a start. i'm sure these pops will continue for some time to come, with the perpetrators becoming more skilful at avoiding detection.

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.

[nytimes.com...]

[Marshall]

As with all scams, they work due to people's ignorance. And no matter how many times and ways your warn them, there is always a gullible person around the corner.

[lucy24]

and arrested about three dozen people

The question is, how many of those people were in decision-making positions? Arrest three dozen individuals willing to engage in activities they know to be deceptive, and three dozen more will crop up to take their place. You have to go pretty high up the line before an arrest really makes a difference.

[cnvi]

This crap will continue and get much worse until the broken internet is fixed. As long as you can spoof an IP, criminals will thrive. Tim Berners Lee recently was interviewed and this was a topic of conversation.. when the web was invented noone considered the fact that criminals would see it as a gold mine. It's only going to get very much worse before it ever gets better.

[edited by: cnvi at 8:46 pm (utc) on Nov 29, 2018]

[Shepherd]

As long as you can spoof an IP

Fixing this would eliminate 99% of the credit card fraud we see on our website.

[graeme_p]

I do not think technical fixes will help unless you can also fix human gullibility. Scammers will just find more elaborate ways of using other people's IPs.

I get a lot of phone calls from people who tell me they are from BT and (if I listen for long enough) that they need me to install Teamviewer to fix a problem or my internet access will be terminated. The funny thing is I have never used BT for internet access (last mile goes over their lines, but there is no way they will deal directly with me) and its years since I last used them for a phone line or anything else.

[cnvi]

@graeme_p .. very good point. Once the obvious flaws are fixed (which could take a decade or more), criminals will just use someone else's identity (IP).

Stephen Hawking was probably right.

[ergophobe]

My fix is this: keep them on the phone as long as possible. If you waste their time, you ruin their business model.

My way is a conversation that goes like this
Them: Are you sitting at your computer?
Me: Yes
Them: Great. Click on the Windows icon
Me: I don't see the Windows icon
Them: Is your computer a Windows computer?
Me: Yes
Them: If you hover the cursor in the lower left, you will see the Windows icon
Me: I can't see a cursor.
Them: Is your computer on?
Me: No.
Them: OK, please turn on your computer.
Me: OK [Silence, phone on speaker phone, lying on the table as I work awayon something productive]
... a minute passes
Them: Is your computer on?
Me: No, it just has sort of a Windows logo thing
Them: OK
... a minute passes
Them: Is your computer on?
etc

[lucy24]

Them: Is your computer a Windows computer?

Oh, dear, the scriptwriters have gotten more intelligent. It used to be possible to keep them occupied for the better part of an hour before it ever entered their brains that you’ve got a Mac (and I'm tolerably sure they’d never heard of Linux).

[ergophobe]

I don't recall the questions. The key is that I give answers that lead them to wait. But I always enjoy it when they ask if I'm sitting at my computer and I say yes and they give me the next instruction and we wrangle a bit until they figure out that my computer is not on (at least as far as they know).