"Hello, I'm calling you from Windows." Scammers have called the journalist Ars Technica

The day before yesterday, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) held a press conference , where it spoke about the serious scale of telephone fraud in the United States associated with technical support for Windows. Illiterate PC users call and trite money. It seems primitive, but in reality, some people succumb to deception and pay for "technical support" from $ 49 to $ 450.

According to the FTC, we are talking about international fraud in the tens of millions of dollars. The FTC froze the assets of six companies that were engaged in a similar business. Five of them did business with “cold calls”, and the sixth placed search advertising on Google on requests [technical support phone], etc., so that users called themselves.

An article about this was published on the Ars Technica website , and - a surprising coincidence - just the next day, one of the journalists of the newspaper received a call from a man who tried to deceive him in exactly the same way! Naturally, the journalist was ready: he pretended to follow the instructions of the fraudster, contacted the person who has Windows on the virtual machine, and completely recorded the telephone conversation.

This is truly an enchanting conversation that needs to be read in its entirety. We only mention the main thing: the person from “Windows technical support” is represented by the name John. He says: "Your computer has transmitted a message that it is infected with a virus." Then a frightened user is led through several menus (the technical support officer says step by step which button to click in each menu) into the Windows administrative panel. There the unfortunate user sees with his own eyes a great many “critical messages” and “errors”. He is told that these errors are caused by viruses.
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Then - an important stage - the victim is asked to try to remove the errors. They are not deleted: “Everything is clear,” says a tech support employee, “these are undetectable viruses.”

Then the user is asked to go to the "technical support site", where they install the RAT for remote administration.



It would seem, how is it possible to call strangers and expect to be able to deceive them? It turns out that this is a widespread practice, and the case with Ars Technica shows that the script of actions of a fraudster looks quite convincing for an unprepared person. The most improbable is the beginning of a conversation. You are called by a person from an unfamiliar number, with an accent, and says that he is “from Windows”. It would seem that only an idiot can take this seriously. But that's the point: starting a conversation in this way, fraudsters quickly filter out idiots with whom you can continue the conversation and with a high degree of probability to bring it to the end.

If a person believes that he is called "from Windows", he will easily believe that the computer is infected with viruses. If the victim entered into a conversation and began to follow the instructions of the technical support officer, then everything goes on like clockwork.

On the Reddit forums, they remembered many cases of fraudsters calling them in person, their friends and relatives.