Inside the US government’s war on tech support scammers | Hacker News Reader

Inside the US government’s war on tech support scammers

arstechnica.com

83 pointsalister30 comments

One of these assholes incessantly calls up my grandmother (and everybody else in her building) daily, proceeds to scream at her when she denies owning a computer, insisting she does. Then calls her a liar (that she is lying she does not own a computer) until she unwillingly hangs up the phone... upset and confused as to why some young man is calling and yelling at her.

They're all coming from random phone numbers, and there seems to be literally nothing you can do to stop it. Apart from screening every one of her calls for her.

There really are some scummy people out there, unfortunately.

How about getting a new, unlisted number?

That's not really an option for a 95 year old woman whose friends only know and use the phonebook, unless she wants to risk losing contact with probably half of them.

To anyone who suffers regular harassment like this, I recommend purchasing a singing bowl[1]. It's like a cross between a bowl, a bell and a large gong; when they call, place the phone receiver inside the bowl and strike the bowl repeatedly. Do this a couple times and chances are they won't call again.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singing_bowl

I simply ask them to wait and leave the phone unattended for a couple of minutes. If they're still there, I say hi, sorry and turn to ask them to wait.

I like this method because I don't have to lie, argue, insult or harm anybody, while the marketers waste time that they could use to annoy fellow humans.

Oh, and it's very effective.

Amazing. I read something a long time ago where someone suggested building an amplifier into your phone's mic on a switch so you can shout at spammers, but this idea is a lot more simple.

My way of dealing with it is giving the phone to my two year old. He gets a kick out of it, and usually keeps the scammers on the hook for a few minutes.

I would really recommend against this. Your child picks up nearly every word they hear. Some Indian shouting cursewords/insults at them isn't good for a developing brain.

Most of the so called call centers and scammers are located at kolkata-India ( I know because I live in Kolkata-India ) , I hate how they scam and loot money from innocent people . Contact Indian Govt' ( Its changed now ) . and tell them about situation .

all this things creating a really bad image of India .

It does create a really bad image. Someone once traced the scammers all the way back to the Indian bank they were using. Do you think the banks care?

Bank probably knows you're unlikely to have much proof. I guess it's similar to the way people get away with putting flyers on car windscreens or paste up posters on buildings. You know with almost absolute certainty that the company being advertised is ultimately responsible, but unless you can connect all the dots, your complaint might not get anywhere.

Most people won't judge so fast a nation of 1.3 billion based on a few scammers.

In the last few weeks Nigeria got much more (deserved) bad reputation due to the kidnappings than for 15 years of scamming combined.

A friend of mine was approached by a similar operation to help them acquire a merchant account. As part of due delegince he went to their office and did cursory research.

He got them the merchant account. And then he started seeing the money roll in. Within 24 hours he heard from his merchant company whom he had a relationship with. They alerted him to the scam. He immediately refunded everyone charged despite his "friend" begging him to release the funds.

They give India a bad name and will ensure no call center business remains.

Scumbags.

I always wondered how those 'YOUR COMPUTER IS INFECTED' ads actually were profitable. Now I see. A very informative article. It goes to show that some simple social engineering can outdo a vast amount of actual computer engineering when it comes to using technology to scam people.

Often they just open a payment gateway and ask the victim for money. Sometimes they install banking malware instead/as well.

I once trolled a tech support scammer pretty hard through his own incompetence. He kept on trying to run a .NET based registry cleaner in my VM without the .net framework installed, and couldn't figure out why it wouldn't work. (I managed to grab the files out of the VM before he deleted them, and it was actually a registry cleaner, some rebrand of a commercial product that I forgot the name of now)

These days its phonecalls. Everyone is continuously ringed by "Microsoft Technical Support".

Given what the HNers know about proxies and VoIP, I don't imagine there is a technical solution short of phone networks only accepting VoIP from some kind of certificate authority, which can be aggressively policed (by Western phone companies, somehow motivated to protect their customers and their good name)?

Phone systems really do seem needlessly outdated, they're the paid service with the crappiest user experience today.

Why is it possible for some creep to call me from ostentatiously fake numbers like "1111111111" or "111 222 333" at 3am only to spout gibberish, try to scam me, or just stay silent on the other end?

I can pick up a headset, push a button and talk to almost anyone in the world. That is not a crappy user experience, despite other problems it might have.

On the flip-side, almost anyone in the world can pick up a headset, push a button and talk to me. That is a crappy user experience.

The obvious solution is for phones to work on a whitelist basis: only accept calls from a list of known good numbers.

Honestly, I'm astonished people put up with this kind of thing. If I was getting the kind of phone spam people are reporting, and no phone company was offering whitelisting, I'd just keep my phone turned off unless I needed it to make an outgoing call.

Whitelisting sounds appealing. I was going to say that it wouldn't be effective due to the ease of faking caller ID. However, I must admit that wouldn't be a big deal unless the scammer already knew one of the numbers on your whitelist.

A bigger problem, though, is that I'd like to accept some calls from strange numbers, like couriers trying to deliver something, or emergency calls from loved ones, or customer service reps calling me back about something.

For whitelisting to be effective, we'd have to change other things about the way the phone network and its participants work.

BTW if all your friends also turned their phones off except when they wanted to call someone, you'd seldom be able to reach them, unless you happened to call just before/after they had made a call.

I've been running a whitelist & blacklist on my landline phone (yes I still have one). Whitelisted callers get one ringtone & the phone flashes green, spam numbers are programmed into my phone as I detect them with no ringtone & the phone flashes pink (for spam). All other calls have a quieter ringtone that I may or may not answer depending on my mood - only once or twice have I missed an important call.

I realize landline phones are on the way out, but whoever makes a cordless multi-handset phone station with lots of number memory (I've nearly filled my 100 number memory) and features like VIP-callers-only, full disabling of ringer, and maybe even a downloadable spam/charity-call database, they'll get my next phone upgrade.

I know that android smartactions allows you to set the phone to ring for only certain white listed numbers.

There are some legitimate reasons to hide your caller ID. Whitelisting from known good numbers will stop those calls, which may not be a problem for individuals, but is a problem if rolled out across a network.

I was just reading through the righteous rants at http://pccare247ripoffcomplaintsreviewscams.wordpress.com.

What is his angle here ?

Was it some bad manager who asked his team at PCCare247 to get more clients by any means necessary while keeping their activities hidden from upper management ?

What else could have happened ?

The FTC recorded that the company

1. Told their clients they had viruses when they did not

2. Profited from this lie.

This is the central issue here.

Oh and by the way, 'we are going to adhere to the golden adage of Silence Is Golden while simultaneously blogging that resolutions were made ( without providing any evidence ) and extolling the possibly non-existing company virtues'.

That looks like a cover tactic. When users are curious about a company they often search company_name + " scam" or "complaint". Whoever set that site up wants to top those search results. Just look at how often they mention the company's name.

Granted such a blatant attempt is not going to fool Google, but it does show intention.

If I could guess whoever ran the scam tried yet another under-handed tactic to mislead victims.

wow, even given the idea that this is written by someone who is "English as a second language" these come across as somewhat unhinged.

An Indian company called iYogi is the pioneer of this scam. They have even raised over $85 million from these Investors:Saama Capital, Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ), SAP Ventures, Canaan Partners, Sequoia Capital.

https://www.google.com/search?q=iyogi+scam

Up next, the city government's war on jaywalking and the county library's war on overdue books.

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