
Inside the US government’s war on tech support scammers - alister
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/stains-of-deceitfulness-inside-the-us-governments-war-on-tech-support-scammers/
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sirdogealot
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.

~~~
andreasvc
How about getting a new, unlisted number?

~~~
sirdogealot
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.

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logicchains
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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singing_bowl)

~~~
Spooky23
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.

~~~
shiftpgdn
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.

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alokyadav15
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 .

~~~
voltagex_
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?

~~~
prawn
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.

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yepyepyep
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.

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jds375
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.

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

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slipstream-
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)

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willvarfar
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)?

~~~
rwallace
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.

~~~
rahimnathwani
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.

~~~
SyneRyder
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.

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simula67
I was just reading through the righteous rants at
[http://pccare247ripoffcomplaintsreviewscams.wordpress.com](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'.

~~~
Danieru
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.

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RealGeek
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](https://www.google.com/search?q=iyogi+scam)

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

