Conversation With a Tech Support Scammer

Venustus

Level 59
Thread author
Verified
Honorary Member
Top Poster
Content Creator
Well-known
Dec 30, 2012
4,809
When investigating an incident that involved domain redirection and a suspected tech support scam, I recorded my interactions with the individual posing as a help desk technician and researched the background of this scheme. It was an educational exchange, to say the least. Here’s what I learned about this person’s and his employer’s techniques and objectives.
https://zeltser.com/tech-support-scammer-conversation/
Interesting!!;)
 

Nico@FMA

Level 27
Verified
May 11, 2013
1,687
When investigating an incident that involved domain redirection and a suspected tech support scam, I recorded my interactions with the individual posing as a help desk technician and researched the background of this scheme. It was an educational exchange, to say the least. Here’s what I learned about this person’s and his employer’s techniques and objectives.
https://zeltser.com/tech-support-scammer-conversation/
Interesting!!;)

Thats one hell of the many stories, what worries me tho is that they seem to get training to be more convincing.
I mean lets be real some scams are so obvious that you have to be a dumb cow to even fall for it, but the last few years you see more and more skilled scam sales people pop-up. Where in the old days you where talking to mister zingzang from india with a broken almost funny accent you are now talking to a seemingly stand-up person in perfect English and with the needed background to make 70 years old people fall for it.
Disgusting... it really is.
 

jamescv7

Level 85
Verified
Honorary Member
Mar 15, 2011
13,070
Overall no matter how they act too much professionalism, there are always a flaw where its an obvious a common characteristics of potential scammers.

Wonder what is the feeling of those tech supporters where all of the lines are scripted/fix from their callers for solution? Surely they are always nervous on their action. ;)
 

SkyLambert

New Member
Nov 16, 2014
5
I stumbled across this yesterday when I mistyped a url. I had switched back to another tab while I waited for the page to load. One second I'm reading MalwareTips, then I nearly jump out of my skin beacause there is a voice coming through my headphones. It takes me a second to find out where it's coming from. When I switch tabs I see that Time Warner Cable (My ISP) and Norton (My AV) are warning me that I might be infected. I immediately recognize it as a scam, close the tab and move on with my day. Kind of weird seeing it here the next day.
 

comfortablynumb15

Level 7
Verified
May 11, 2015
326
It's always important for users to remember that legitimate security software will not warn you on a webpage about an infection. It will always pop-up from your task bar. Some software will warn you if you land on a phishing page by showing it as a warning page, but that is much different from an actual infection. Blocking this sort of thing is one of the greatest strengths of MBAM, imho. NoScript can also come in handy, as can the ability to block by URL in antivirus software such as Avast.

Another potential protection, when using Chrome, is to take advantage of "Content Settings". In Chrome/Settings/Advanced Settings, you can look under Privacy and find "Content Settings". Click this, and in the menu you want to look under Javascript/Manage Exceptions. Here you can add any prefix such as .com, .gov, .edu, etc and in the little drop-down menu at the side, set it for Allow or Block. This prevents Javascript from running on weird domains such as .info, .cc, etc. You can do this by country domain, but be mindful that not all Chinese, Russian and other websites are harmful and, if you're in said country you may find yourself blocked from a lot of the web.
 

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