New Type of Scam

Posted on: August 13th, 2010

In the last couple of weeks I got some questions about strange phone calls people received. It turned out that it’s a new type of scam that just getting started.

Here’s how the scam seems to work:

- Mr. X gets called by someone with very heavy accent (people told me that they usually had to ask for a supervisor because they just couldn’t understand the original person). Mr. X gets told that his computer has viruses.
- The callers claim to be from some reputable company such as Microsoft. But the website references and other information they provide don’t support these fact. In fact they seem to be hastily put together, and only very recently registered.
- In order to prove that Mr. X’s computer is infected they will try to do a remote assistance session (ie. take control of Mr X’s computer) and they will pull up regular files and tell “look all these are infected files”. This trick works on most people not very savvy on the internal workings of a computer.
- After it is “proven” that Mr. X’s computer is all infected he’s offered a “life time antivirus”.

What happens after that is not clear. Fortunately, all of the people who got this phone call and contacted me did not fall for this offer.

I predict that this scam won’t be long lasting. The reason is that it has a lot of overhead (human resources) and the offenders can be fairly easily tracked down because they use phone lines.

The important thing to remember is not to give any personal information to people you don’t know over the phone, no matter how convincing they are. It’s also advisable to ask for some kind of proof of legitimacy. You can also run a Google search on the phone number they are calling from.

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