Tag: scam

I am calling you from Windows… Oh really?

Ars Technica has a great piece about the scammy calls I sometimes get when I pick up my house phone (currently broke).

When the call came yesterday morning, I assumed at first I was being trolled—it was just too perfect to be true. My phone showed only “Private Caller” and, when I answered out of curiosity, I was connected to “John,” a young man with a clear Indian accent who said he was calling from “Windows Technical Support.” My computer, he told me, had alerted him that it was infested with viruses. He wanted to show me the problem—then charge me to fix it.

Thankfully somethings happening to stop this scam

This scam itself is a few years old now, but I had not personally received one of the calls until yesterday—the very day that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced a major crackdown on such “boiler room” call center operations. The very day that six civil lawsuits were filed against the top practitioners

Its a shame Ars Technica didn’t record it, but of course I did, twice…!


The ammyy scam: the worst social engineering I’ve ever heard

Email Scam

For some stupid reason which I have no idea… I got 3 calls from a call centre while I was at home trying to work today.

It got to be a bit of joke by the second call because with the first call I got so peed off about what they were trying to tell me I just hung up after 30secs. When someone called again, claiming to be calling from Microsoft customer support, this time I playing along with this call just to waste there time and work out what they wanted me to do so i could warn other people not to follow the steps.

Caller: open Internet Explorer and type in ammyy.com.

Caller: click to download and install ammyy

Me: I can’t do that (lies of course)

Caller: Why not? click the link and choose install.

Anyway that went on and on for about 20mins, and so of course I hit Twitter with some funny bits I was hearing on the phone. By the time I finished… I was doing stuff like using the toilet and saying I was still in front of the windows XP machine (I would have thought the sound of me peeing would be a clear clue that I wasn’t really listening)

By the time it finished, Nic Ferrier suggested I should record them next time they call. So I did, but I didn’t catch the start of the conversation, so I started recording about 10-15mins in. Here’s the recording with a con-artist.

Recording-1 with a con-artist by cubicgarden

It is a scam (so popular its actually called the ammyy scam) as you can guess but weirdly it does actually catch people out… [1][2][3]

Hopefully the recording will help raise the profile of this scam and stop other people falling for this frankly terriable social engineering scam.

Wanna buy a laptop mate, yours for 300 pounds

So I was walking for the train today because my scooter has a flat tyre. Walking down briskly, listening to a podcast as usual when these guys roll up in a slightly beaten up old style Vauxhall Caliver. The passenger rolls down his window and says, You wanna buy a laptop mate? At first I couldn't fully hear him but once he opened the laptop , a Sony Viao. It all quickly clicked into place.

So the first thing which goes through my mind is not to get too close to the car just in case they happen to have some weapon. But I do stop and lift up my sunglasses. The guy with a very strong Irish accent, almost sounded put on. Says just got it from PC World brand new with recepts, yours for 300 pounds. I look at the driver who seems more concerned about driving off quickly that the deal which was happening. So anyway, being the haggler that I am, I said sounds expensive for a knocked off Laptop, hows 100 pounds? And you know what he seriously considers it. By which I'm already reaching for my sunglasses and walking. These guys follow me down the road, showing off all the features of a standard XP install. Till I say 100 pounds or nothing. They disappear shouting its too low for them and they will easily find someone else in this area (woolwich).

To be fair I shouldn't have said anything, but I wanted to see how desperate they were to get rid of the laptop. It was a nice Sony Viao with motion eye camera and looked to be about a 2.4ghz Pentium 4. But I was never going to buy it. I was also thinking about all the angles of there deal. For example I carry a bag which looks like a laptop bag, so I was wondering if they were really after that. I mean it would make sense why they would ask me rather than any of the other people walking down the crowded street. And there were lots of people walking fast to catch the train to London.

Just thought I'd share this, as I have got older my brush with the blackmarket (why do they call it that?) has become less and less which is a good thing. I've not had this kind of a deal since I was living in Thornton Heath (south central London) funny stuff, eh?

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