Anyone ever had one of these? I've had a couple and it's now become a game to see how long I can keep them on the phone for.
First, they tell you that there is currently high virus activity on the internet, and that your computer has been automatically downloading some of these viruses. They walk you through running Event Viewer and point out all the errors, which they claim are viruses. This presumably is to convince you that you have a genuine issue (even though seeing errors in event viewer is obviously fairly normal for a windows machine).
If you haven't put the phone down by this point, they then direct you to a URL and get you to download and run the VNC-like remote access software. I haven't allowed them to go any further than this, but apparently once they're able to remote in to your PC they start harvesting credit card details and banking logins etc.
Sounds like a remarkably elaborate mechanism just to get remote access to a couple of PCs, but from the sounds of the phone calls they are a pretty big operation (you can overhear a lot of other call centre agents), in India (of course). From poking around it sounds like the scam has been running for years in one form or another, so I can only imagine it works pretty well. Social engineering is supposedly a very effective form of scam.
First, they tell you that there is currently high virus activity on the internet, and that your computer has been automatically downloading some of these viruses. They walk you through running Event Viewer and point out all the errors, which they claim are viruses. This presumably is to convince you that you have a genuine issue (even though seeing errors in event viewer is obviously fairly normal for a windows machine).
If you haven't put the phone down by this point, they then direct you to a URL and get you to download and run the VNC-like remote access software. I haven't allowed them to go any further than this, but apparently once they're able to remote in to your PC they start harvesting credit card details and banking logins etc.
Sounds like a remarkably elaborate mechanism just to get remote access to a couple of PCs, but from the sounds of the phone calls they are a pretty big operation (you can overhear a lot of other call centre agents), in India (of course). From poking around it sounds like the scam has been running for years in one form or another, so I can only imagine it works pretty well. Social engineering is supposedly a very effective form of scam.
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