Scammer from the US earned millions of dollars, pretending to be Microsoft tech support

Recently, a fraudster from the USA (North Carolina) pleaded guilty in court, who was able to fraudulently earn more than $ 3 million in four years . He received money from owners of PCs and laptops, which the fraudster introduced himself as a Microsoft tech support employee. The name of the bench is Bishap Mittal (Bishap Mittal), he is now 24 years old.

He was arrested on March 12, a few days later Mittal admitted his guilt. He did not work himself, but for a couple with an accomplice (the name of the accomplice so far remains unknown). The attackers created websites that were owned by a real company, Capstone Technologies LLC.

On the resources in question above, there were special scripts that showed visitors information about the infection of their PCs and laptops with viruses. In order to get more traffic to sites, attackers bought contextual advertising from Google and Bing. In addition, pop-up windows placed on various resources that showed ads to visitors were launched.
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Most of the warnings were formed in such a way as to be similar to the style of Microsoft - namely, service warnings. As far as we know, all this worked only for US citizens.

The victim, in addition to the message, was shown a phone number of supposedly Microsoft technical support to solve the problem with the virus. When a person called this number, he would end up in a call center located in India. Well, the center staff was notified of the need to inform the victim of technical problems on her computer. The main legend is the conflict of two antiviruses.

The caller was offered to solve the problem by purchasing the services of technical support specialists. At the same time, the cost of such services is considerable - from $ 200 to $ 2.4 thousand. As you can already guess, in fact there were no virus conflicts or other problems on the client’s PC - the attackers simply took the money and did not provide any support.

The scheme existed from 2014 to August 2018. Fraudsters used such company names as Authenza Solutions LLC, MS-Squad Technologies, MS-Squad.com, MS Infotech, United Technologies and Reventus Technologies. Everything was done in order to somehow make it clear to "customers" about the involvement of these companies in Microsoft.

The malefactor is found guilty on March 20 of this year.



The case of Mittal is far from unique - it just became known about him. Much more scammers remain at large, and they continue to deceive PC users. And this is a problem not only for users, but also for technology companies like Microsoft, whose names are fraudsters. According to representatives of the Redmond company, only in 2017 she received 153 thousand complaints from victims of fraud scammers. Every year the number of complaints increases. And this is only the United States, the total number of countries from which there have been reports of fraud - 183 .


Source: Microsoft

True, not all users who are trying to deceive, believe the attackers. Victims - about 15% of the total number of those who reported the problem. Typically, the amounts that are scammed by fraudsters are $ 200- $ 400. Although there are exceptions. For example, two years ago, "Microsoft technical support" withdrew more than $ 89 thousand from the account of a resident of the Netherlands

Cybercriminals do not always launch sites and establish companies. In many cases, phishing has been used, which has remained effective for many years. In addition, the attackers even use the method of calling subscribers, for example, by numbers from the city directory. In some cases, “large companies” believe and pay for technical assistance.

Indian call centers are used to prevent the victim from contacting the company that makes the calls. But Microsoft has already appealed to the Indian police. After a series of corporate complaints, law enforcement officers conducted several raids, visiting 26 call centers. 63 people were arrested.

But all this - only the tip of the iceberg. In addition, they involve not only the name of Microsoft, but also many other technology companies. There are still a lot of gullible users, so that both cold dialing, phishing, and other methods used by intruders work against them.