Researchers Play Along With “Tech Support” Scam Calls

Have you ever been tempted to play along with scammers that phone just to see where it goes and to give them some grief? Researchers at the State University of New York at Stony Brook did that and more.

They sought out scammers who claim to be from Microsoft or some sort of official tech support, and followed it through to see what happened. They set up virtual machines that looked like normal PC’s to the scammers who remote on, and let the scam play out.

This Wired article has more detail, including the paper that the researchers wrote, and recordings of the conversations. It is worth a read if you are curious about how they do it.

Basically the scammer tells the victim that their computer is infected with viruses and spyware. Then for about $300, offers to clean it up.

Only about 2% of the people they talk to fall for the scam – but the revenue generated is in the tens of millions of dollars.

The US FTC has already used information provided by the researchers to get a $10 million penalty against a Florida based call centre. About 10% of the call centres are in the US – 85% are in India.