Beating back the telephone virus scammers

[matt_symes]

You can do that in some countries, but you have to register to opt-out. In the UK it's done through TPS. Once you're registered it's an offence for telemarketers to contact you.

A good friend of mine owns a guest house in Bristol. He opted out and still gets unsolicited phone calls.

The "service" is a waste of time.

[Paddy Landau]

Excellent work Paddy !

Thanks, though many of the ideas came from other people in this very thread.

Is there anything that the ordinary person can do to fight back? Can we track back what IP address they are using and just continually send pings to their gateway to slow down their connection? Or something? I'm not likely to get any more of these calls but I'd love to be able to fight back.

One of the posters mentioned "reverse h4x0r". I think he means tracing him backwards and loading a virus on his machine. I don't know whether or not that's possible, as you'd have to go through LogMeIn or TeamViewer and through his router, but maybe it is possible.

I think Anonymous should stop targeting innocent people, and instead target fraudsters like this.

You can do that in some countries, but you have to register to opt-out. In the UK it's done through TPS. Once you're registered it's an offence for telemarketers to contact you.

I live in the UK and I have been registered with TPS for years. Unfortunately, it doesn't stop the callers. It almost seems to be an invitation to call! Only persistent UK-based companies can be stopped because of the lack of resources.

[Paqman]

I live in the UK and I have been registered with TPS for years. Unfortunately, it doesn't stop the callers. It almost seems to be an invitation to call! Only persistent UK-based companies can be stopped because of the lack of resources.

Agreed. Better than doing nothing though.

[s.fox]

I had a similar experience yesterday. They asked me what operating system my computer runs, so I said Debian. They didn't know what that was and hung up.

[Shazaam]

On a distantly related side note, the scammers don't have to call you to scam your money..
My brother had a problem with his pc (which later turned out to be blown caps on his Dell mb) so he signed up for one of those "Driver Doctor" driver search websites. Paid $40 US to sign up for their service. Of course, one of their services was using Remote Desktop to help find the right "drivers" for his problem pc. Once in, they gave him the same basic scam pitch that others have run across... "Your pc is infected with BAD stuff pay us $300 US to fix it!". Luckily he called me before he paid them.

Long story short, he has new bank accounts/cards; is a little smarter when it comes to scams; and a new pc.

[Paddy Landau]

Fun! Another set of scammers called me. A bit more organised than last time, though this time they didn't have fake software.

Again, they ran off the back of genuine websites: Ammyy, LogMeIn, and IOBit (with the Advanced Systems Care, though they took care to rename the file and hide its origin).

Their website was creativesolutionsonline(dot)net and they work through the Bank of Baroda in India.

I was also a bit more organised, getting some nice screen shots and reporting them to LogMeIn.

• The errors in the Event Viewer showed files that had been corrupted, and the warnings showed files that were about to be corrupted.

• Another thing they did that I forgot to report last time was to open a DOS command window and enter "tree", pretending that this was scanning the computer for viruses. When it finished, they quickly typed "expired", and said, "See? This shows your license has expired."

• Yet another was to issue the command "inf hacking file" (which just opens the directory C:/WINDOWS/inf) to gasp at all the malicious files there. "You don't know anything about these files, do you?" Then try to open a file, to which Windows reports that it doesn't know this file and how should it open it? That, obviously, proved that the files were malicious!

• The computer is also slow, being restricted by my Virtual Box to little memory, no caching, and limited CPU. Naturally, this was caused by the malicious files in my computer.

• Apparently CCleaner protects my computer against viruses, so my computer didn't have any viruses but it did have malicious files, which are more dangerous as they corrupt my files day by day.

I had to mute the telephone several times when I burst out laughing at their crap! But my laughter was a bit subdued by the knowledge that they use this nonsense to fool the gullible.

I didn't manage to keep them on the phone for over two hours this time, but I did manage over one hour.

At the end, I balked at the very last minute over paying, saying I'd rather take my very slow computer to the recycling and buy a new computer with Windows 7 and more RAM.

The woman passed me to her "manager" who was, I must say, well versed in selling. But, somehow (gosh, I don't know how), I wasn't persuaded. I told him instead I would go out to buy a Mac because they never get viruses. He got very agitated at that point!

[matt_symes]

It looks like you're known to them now. Expect more calls.

Once again, excellent work Paddy. I have really enjoyed reading this thread.

It makes up for that *cough* tub girl thread.

[winh8r]

This made me laugh!

They have become a nice entertainment for you as you string them along.

The company you mentioned is affiliated to WinPCtechnologies, and various others, all based in Kolkatta, India and hosted on severs located in the UAE.

Here are a couple more responses that are good for getting rid of them:

1. Cover the phone microphone partially and say "Okay John, We have got him get a trace running on this one"

2. Just say "Yes" to everything they ask you, no other words, just yes.

3.Keep a book near the phone, and when they call, just start reading from it without pausing.

4. If you don't want to waste any time getting rid of them, the ultimate response to their first question is "This IS Micros*ft Technical Support, how can I help you?"



Keep posting your exploits, Paddy, they are great!

[matt_symes]

If you don't want to waste any time getting rid of them, the ultimate response to their first question is "This IS Micros*ft Technical Support, how can I help you?"

Genius !

[Paddy Landau]

Here are a couple more responses that are good for getting rid of them:

If I'd just wanted to get rid of them, I'd have put the phone down.

Rather, I want to keep them occupied so that they have less time to spend on scamming others.

Oh yes, I have their UK-based phone number: +44 20 8099 0364 (obviously VOIP to India). Can anyone do anything with it?