- Jan 24, 2011
- 9,378
A UK court has handed down a sentence of suspended jail time plus fines and costs to the operator of a phony tech support cold-calling scam.
Mohammed Khalid Jamil ran a firm called Smart Support Guys based in Luton, and staff at his India-based call centre are thought to have carried out the deceptive cold calling.
The scam has a fairly standard pattern - victims are called out of the blue, and informed that their computer is in some kind of danger, with the caller posing as a technician either from Microsoft or from an affiliated support firm.
The victim is persuaded to look at some alerts on their machine, usually a standard built-in tool such as the Event Viewer in Windows, and tricked into believing that normal, trivial error messages are a sure sign of horrible malware infection.
The caller may also try to get their target to grant remote access to their machine, so the scammer can demonstrate the phony danger.
From here the victims are pressured into allowing installation of software, usually free security tools but occasionally malware, and then have to pay for the tools and assistance.
In Jamil's case it seems Microsoft's free basic anti-malware was installed for a fee ranging from £35 to £150 (roughly $60-$250).
The scam has been a fairly common sight for several years now, spinning off from earlier fake anti-virus scams and evolving over time with the occasionaltweak to its techniques.
Read more: http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/201...ort-scammer-escapes-with-a-slap-on-the-wrist/
Mohammed Khalid Jamil ran a firm called Smart Support Guys based in Luton, and staff at his India-based call centre are thought to have carried out the deceptive cold calling.
The scam has a fairly standard pattern - victims are called out of the blue, and informed that their computer is in some kind of danger, with the caller posing as a technician either from Microsoft or from an affiliated support firm.
The victim is persuaded to look at some alerts on their machine, usually a standard built-in tool such as the Event Viewer in Windows, and tricked into believing that normal, trivial error messages are a sure sign of horrible malware infection.
The caller may also try to get their target to grant remote access to their machine, so the scammer can demonstrate the phony danger.
From here the victims are pressured into allowing installation of software, usually free security tools but occasionally malware, and then have to pay for the tools and assistance.
In Jamil's case it seems Microsoft's free basic anti-malware was installed for a fee ranging from £35 to £150 (roughly $60-$250).
The scam has been a fairly common sight for several years now, spinning off from earlier fake anti-virus scams and evolving over time with the occasionaltweak to its techniques.
Read more: http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/201...ort-scammer-escapes-with-a-slap-on-the-wrist/
