The “you have a virus on your Microsoft PC” scam is back. I thought they had locked up the people responsible and this was dead. Like everything related to the internet crime – spam, botnets they always find a way back.
I got home from work on Friday and took a call from Anna of http://speedytechies.com/. They apparently have thousands of staff servicing thousands of customers every day despite the fact that the website is only around 3 months old. Pretty impressive business growth.
Either that or Anna is lying and she doesn’t work for speedytechies. She sounded as if she was from India or maybe the Philippines – that general part of the world anyway.
http://speedytechies.com/ is owned by a small business based at a residential address in Houston Texas. You can easily find out lots of info about the business and its owner by shelling out a few dollars to an online resource that does this kind of thing. Not worth it because the chances are the scammer has nothing to do with this guy. Slightly suspicious that the website is only 3 months old though.
Anna wanted me to go to www.teamviewer.com so that she could take over my laptop to check out the virus. www.teamviewer.com looks like a legit site though it would be interesting to audit their list of paying customers to get a trail back to the scammers.
Anna gave me a phone number to call back if I had a problem: 18007137734. The line with Anna was not great so it might be wrong and don’t know where it terminates as I’ve not tried ringing it. Her line quality kept disappearing so she was probably using Skype or some similar OTT service.
I guess it would be possible to trace where Anna was calling from and compile a list of times that her ilk had tried the scam. It isn’t easy though for a punter and it would take a concerted effort from a number of stakeholders. It would be easier if the whole world was VoIP but it isn’t. Also the level of individual harm that will probably accrue from a single incident is not worth the effort it would take. This would have to be coordinated on a wide scale to build up a body of evidence for cross border efforts/cooperation to kick in.
That’s all for now. Ciao.
3 replies on “The return of the “virus on your Microsoft PC” scam #speedytechies @TeamViewer”
Teamviewer is of course most legit – it’s a very common remote support tool used by all sorts of supports desks – the sort of thing even Timico might use.
Hate this scam though, I know someone personally who got caught out by this a while ago.
I’ve had a call from them in the past too which I quickly ended, and my wife, to here credit, got a similar call, and then played with them, being deliberately slow and acting like she was going along with it to waste their time before they twigged what she was up to and they hung up on her 🙂
The scammers use the free versions of things like Teamviewer or Ammyy – the latter even have a warning http://www.ammyy.com/en/admin_mu.html
The damage to the victim is typical £149 or £199 so this isn’t a trivial fraud, especially as many victims are elderly. I have spent time capturing and forwarding payment details but the police need you to have been robbed before they’ll investigate. With payment via paypal and the like there is enough of a trail to capture or at least disrupt this people if only someone was taking them on.
A virtual XP machine running on a Linux box is handy for playing with these people.
I just ask them what PC is the virus on …. the lounge one , the bedroom one , or one of the other 8 LOL.
oh and what about two Mac’s, they soon give up then 🙂