Court Shuts Down Alleged $120M Tech Support Scam 129
wiredmikey writes A federal court has temporarily shut down and frozen the assets of two telemarketing operations accused by the FTC of scamming customers out of more than $120 million by deceptively marketing computer software and tech support services. According to complaints filed by the FTC, since at least 2012, the defendants used software designed to trick consumers into believing there were problems with their computers and then hit them with sales pitches for tech support products and services to fix their machines.
According to the FTC, the scams began with computer software that claimed to improve the security or performance of the customer's computer. Typically, consumers downloaded a free, trial version of the software that would run a computer system scan. The scan always identified numerous errors, whether they existed or not. Consumers were then told that in order to fix the problems they had to purchase the paid version of the software for between $29 and $49. In order to activate the software after the purchase, consumers were then directed to call a toll-free number and connected to telemarketers who tried to sell them unneeded computer repair services and software, according to the FTC complaint. The services could cost as much as $500, the FTC stated.
According to the FTC, the scams began with computer software that claimed to improve the security or performance of the customer's computer. Typically, consumers downloaded a free, trial version of the software that would run a computer system scan. The scan always identified numerous errors, whether they existed or not. Consumers were then told that in order to fix the problems they had to purchase the paid version of the software for between $29 and $49. In order to activate the software after the purchase, consumers were then directed to call a toll-free number and connected to telemarketers who tried to sell them unneeded computer repair services and software, according to the FTC complaint. The services could cost as much as $500, the FTC stated.
Why... (Score:5, Informative)
did this take so long to occur. It amazes me both that people fall for this, and that the credit card companies allow these services to operate under merchant accounts.
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did this take so long to occur.
Big ship turns slow -- the inertia of government / judiciary is fearsome.
Maybe they spent the time gathering intel and evidence, dotting Is and crossing Ts. Building a case. Due process and all that.
Either way.. win!
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If something takes forever then it's not a win. Maybe the FCC needs an app like Mr. Number.
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And yet this has reached a conclusion, so it did not take forever. Sounds like a win?
Re:Why... (Score:5, Interesting)
My guess is that someone important was scammed OR the money got to the level of "important" for the banks. This has got to be one of the easiest things that the FBI could track and bust.
A related question, though. As anyone who's ever done support knows, the average computer is awash with problems. How different would the situation have been if the scan had been real instead of a scam?
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Legitimate AV software ...
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Legitimate AV software that will scan for free will also fix for free. You never see it scan but refuse to fix until you pay up unless it is a scam, AFAIK.
My Windows XP has known bugs which Microsoft refuses to fix. Instead, they are asking me to upgrade to Windows 8. Scam!
Re:Why... (Score:5, Funny)
Man, these people are idiots. Why didn't they just use MyCleanPC?
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Man, these people are idiots. Why didn't they just use MyCleanPC?
I'm surprised it is not posted here many many times as, for once, it may be on topic.
haven't read the fuckin' article (Score:2)
...but is that one of the scammers that was shut down?
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...but is that one of the scammers that was shut down?
We can only hope...
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Yeah the telephone support is amazing.
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Where does Bennett stand on the MyCleanPC vs telemarketer controversy...?
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It amazes me both that people fall for this, and that the credit card companies allow these services to operate under merchant accounts.
The latter shouldn't amaze you. The credit card companies get a cut, I mean transaction fee.
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Why would the credit card companies allow this?
1) It brings in money to the credit card companies. They have no incentive to stop a money flow from coming in.
2) If the scam gets too much negative PR, the credit card company can "discover" the scammer, cut off their accounts, and publicly declare how shocked (SHOCKED!) they are that this scam was taking place.
In other words, scams like this are free money to the credit card companies with no downside.
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did this take so long to occur. It amazes me both that people fall for this, and that the credit card companies allow these services to operate under merchant accounts.
More than that. Why isn't this criminal?
I understand why you may not want to criminalize every dubious business practise, but these folks were literally telling straightforward lies to consumers to make the sale. Why isn't that fraud?
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But the whole story is that the court shut them down. Surely it is considered fraud (or something similar), no?
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did this take so long to occur. It amazes me both that people fall for this, and that the credit card companies allow these services to operate under merchant accounts.
They weren't infringing on Disney copyright.
Stop government oppression! (Score:2)
This is just another example of government interference in the market place and driving free enterprise out of business! Let the industry regulate its self!
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did this take so long to occur. It amazes me both that people fall for this, and that the credit card companies allow these services to operate under merchant accounts.
The credit card companies like these guys. After all, they did not steal the card numbers, payments were made and there are no losses, as would happen if the card/card number was stolen.
As the card companies would say
"There is a sucker born every second".
Let's just execute the principles live on TV (Score:2, Insightful)
If we consider the aggregate harm of these scams, they're on the order of mass murder, possibly up there with actual war. Thus the punishment should fit the crime. It's not even like these people have the Moist von Lipwig excuse of scamming the scammers.
To be honest... (Score:1)
This sounds a lot like getting medical treatment in America.
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Mod parent up!
Small fish (Score:5, Insightful)
Just change a few words and multiply the numbers:
Typically, consumers downloaded a free, trial version of the software. The business analysts always identified numerous suboptimal business processes, whether they existed or not. Consumers were then told that in order to fix the problems they had to purchase the paid version of the software for between $290,000 and $490,000. In order to customize the software after the purchase, consumers were then directed to call a certified partners network and connected to consultants who tried to sell them unneeded upgrades and tools. The services could cost as much as $500 per hour.
...and you get a typical SAP implementation scenario.
Re:Small fish (Score:4, Insightful)
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so what you're saying is, the real value of SAP is $29 per site license?
(next dumb question: does SAP actually do what it says on the tin?)
PC Cleaner (Score:2)
I kind of figure something was up when PC Cleaner said my linux machine had currupt entries in the registry; but al you can say is P.T. Barnum was right, there is a sucker born every minute.
Re:PC Cleaner (Score:5, Funny)
I kind of figure something was up when PC Cleaner said my linux machine had currupt entries in the registry;
Wait a year or two. They're just getting ready for systemd.
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so many times I've had this happen... you're a milk bone to the telemarketing dogs if you run a small business.
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You ever want to really confuse them? Tell them your keyboard doesn't have a Windows key, like my old IBM model M. They'll spend all kinds of time walking you through trying to find it..
"Please to be looking at the left side of your keyboard, do you see the button C T R L?"
"Yes, I see it."
"The Windows key is being right next to that one"
"No, there's no key right next to it, there is one that says A L T a little further over"
"No, there has to be a key between that has the Windows logo"
"I'm telling you, the
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I talked with one of them on Saturday. After spending about 25 minutes acting like a total doofus - I asked him if it made any difference which enter key I used because they are shaped differently. It was really fun thinking up stupid things to ask him. After about 25 minutes, we were at the point where he wanted to open an internet connection, I called him out and hung up. (I had also drank a lot of coffee and really needed use the bathroom) He called back 5 times to cuss me out. Name an insult and
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My personal best is about 50 minutes, before I got bored with them. I told them I only had flaky dial-up service. I kept playing the modem connection sound, then tell them that their software was downloading. After waiting for 5 minutes, asking them rude personal questions in the interim, I tell them that I am at 90%, then shout a lot of expletives, saying that the connection went down, and need to reconnect. Once they passed me off to their tech support people because I told them the issue was on their
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I've gotten two of these phone calls in the past few months. The first time I followed their instructions up until the point that they wanted to take over my computer. They pointed me to a legitimate screen sharing application. I gave them the wrong access code. Once the caller realized I wasn't going to fall for the scam, he got ANGRY and told me that *tomorrow* he was going to destroy my computer. I challenged him to do it now. :-) I should have told him my IP address was 127.0.0.1.
I still wonder *w
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I've gotten two of these phone calls in the past few months. The first time I followed their instructions up until the point that they wanted to take over my computer. They pointed me to a legitimate screen sharing application. I gave them the wrong access code. Once the caller realized I wasn't going to fall for the scam, he got ANGRY and told me that *tomorrow* he was going to destroy my computer. I challenged him to do it now. :-) I should have told him my IP address was 127.0.0.1.
I still wonder *what* he was going to do once he took control. Setup a remote control SPAM bot? Encrypt everything? Or simply ask for $500.00 to "fix" all the problems?
If I had an old throwaway system, I would have pointed him to that...but then I would be worried that he would have been able to infect my other computers on my network...maybe.
Randy -- regardlessitwasfun
Hey! don't give that out, that's my IP address!
I've gotten a few of those calls too and played the same game. But before he could (in his thick Hindi accent) express his outrage, I verbally abused him until he hung up.
I do have a spare Windows VM for the next time, assuming I have time to block all network access except the screen sharing app. That could be fun. A waste of time, but possibly amusing.
You know what's really sad? (Score:3)
Given that: 1) people were actually spending money with strangers who called them on the phone, and 2) how many home Windows machines are infested with malware, this shows that you could make a hell of a lot of money by modifying the operation just slightly--have people download legitimate scanning software which would only report real problems. You trade away some of your profit margin in exchange for not going to jail. (Granted, you might still run afoul of telemarketing regulations, but that's a whole lot less serious than fraud, civil vs criminal.)
Re:You know what's really sad? (Score:5, Interesting)
Greed.
There is/was a popular scam that involved getting people to look at their Windows error log in order to convince them that they needed "help." It was quite effective because the average user easily accepts that errors are the same as problems.
My mom and a co-worker were both targets of this particular scam. The target would receive an unsolicited phone call from someone who made the target think the caller was associated with Microsoft who would show them the errors on their computer. The caller would then try to convince the target to let the caller have access to their computer. Neither of the targets had a clue that the errors they were seeing were normal and it could have gone quite badly for them. Both my mom and co-worker declined to let the caller do anything on their computer saying that they had someone who handled this kind of stuff for them (me.) Naturally I received a not quite panicked call shortly after and was able to reassure them it was only a scam and their computer was fine, but I think either could have been victimized if they hadn't had someone they know and absolutely trust to handle serious computer issues for them.
My company gives me a phone and it's an iPhone so I can give good tech support to the boss who "needs" an iPhone. Because it is a company phone, I can't jailbreak it or hack around on it in good conscience, but it chafes. I can't put whatever software I want on it or make it work the way I would prefer because Apple makes their customers a deal: trust us completely and we'll make your device work the way it should.
As much as it chafes me to deal with such a walled garden, I can't help but think it's the way consumer products need to be designed. The harder it is for my mom and co-worker to mess up their device, the less time I have to spend fixing it.
With that background in mind, I can't help but hope MS goes more and more down the road toward building in their own computer security because it removes the incentive to get an anti-virus package which has to "solve" issues that aren't really problems in order to appear useful.
If the scammers were just a little less greedy, they could have used the same approach to sell actual anti-virus packages. I think most anti-virus companies are just slightly less greedy or they'd be running the same scams.
Greed is the thin greasy line that separates "legitimate" anti-virus vendors from criminals. For decades I've told people they needed antivirus and security software despite knowing the big vendors introduce a new set of problems, because it was necessary. Now MS is building it in and I can tell them to just use the free MS software that's built in and I get less support headaches. I'm sure it's hurting the AV vendors, but I've had to fix too many problems they caused to feel much sympathy.
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to bad apples walled garden was to much censorship
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Too bad nobody has ever taught you the difference between "to" and "too".
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My father and my wife's grandmother were both hit by this scam. My dad almost ran their software until the guy mentioned how it would let him remote in. This worried him enough for him to call me. (Though he still tried arguing with me for a bit that "it might be real" when I told him it was a scam.)
My wife's grandmother only escaped from being victimized due to extreme technological non-savvy. Yes, talking her through downloading and running a file was *SO* horrible that the scammer gave up! (They cal
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Reminds me of the time my Cuban refugee ex-husband wanted me to help him work with the widow of a deceased Spanish ambassador to Nigeria, who needed to move several million dollars out of a Nigerian bank account before the Nigerian government seized the money. It took a while to convince him that it was a scam.
Re:You know what's "really" really sad? (Score:3)
That we don't prosecute enough false advertising and deception with intent to defraud claims!
It's hard to blame the root cause of the problem on anything but the current levels of corruption infesting our Government. Instead of agencies built to enforce regulations doing what they are intended, they are investigating bullshit to make corporations more and more money and keep the cronies in office so that their circle continues to have revenue while the "common" people suffer.
Yup, stories like yours are a s
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I agree completely. We need a law that says simply: It shall be illegal to do any misleading advertising.
Financial penalties would rapidly escalate and repeated offences would subject company owners to jail time.
The offender would be required to publish in a similar venue a statement admitting to, and apologizing for, the misleading advertising.
The test of misleading would be if average people would believe something untrue after viewing the ad.
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...but instead of putting these shitbags out of business...
You seem to be assuming that they're operating from countries with competent law enforcement available to cooperate with ours, and that they stay in one place long enough to find them. Both assumptions are incorrect.
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Your straw man is not a very good one. If you read TFA you would have seen that _all_ of the companies in the decisions are US companies.
As part of the legal maneuver, the state of Florida joined the FTC in filing two separate cases against companies who allegedly sold the bogus software and the telemarketers who sold the unnecessary tech support services. In the first case, the defendants selling software include PC Cleaner Inc.; Netcom3 Global Inc.; Netcom3 Inc., also doing business as Netcom3 Software Inc.; and Cashier Myricks, Jr. The telemarketing defendants include Inbound Call Experts LLC; Advanced Tech Supportco. LLC; PC Vitalware LLC; Super PC Support LLC; Robert D. Deignan; Paul M. Herdsman; and Justin M. Wright.
In the second case, the defendants selling software include Boost Software Inc. and Amit Mehta, and the telemarketing defendants include Vast Tech Support LLC, also doing business as OMG Tech Help, OMG Total Protection, OMG Back Up, downloadsoftware.com, and softwaresupport.com; OMG Tech Help LLC; Success Capital LLC; Jon Paul Holdings LLC; Elliot Loewenstern; Jon-Paul Vasta; and Mark Donahue.
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Your straw man is not a very good one. If you read TFA you would have seen that _all_ of the companies in the decisions are US companies.
Yes, but... Those are the companies which our government DID shutdown. Your post that I responded to was complaining about the government not shutting down such scams. So if you really want to get picky like this, your argument itself was a misdirection. So, show me the scammers that are operating out of the USA, and which the FTC is not taking action against.
What? Not got any examples? Because the ones still being run are in India? Yep, thought so.
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What? Not got any examples? Because the ones still being run are in India? Yep, thought so.
The examples are in the complaints that took YEARS to receive any action on. There is no reasonable or efficient mechanism for dealing with these companies in the US. How long were each of those companies listed in the order operating in the US? Some were operating for as long as a decade, so perhaps you should validate facts before attempting to claim that everything scam related is from overseas.
Researching a few facts is all that is required to demonstrate that your arguments are invalid.
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Greed.
There is/was a popular scam that involved getting people to look at their Windows error log in order to convince them that they needed "help." It was quite effective because the average user easily accepts that errors are the same as problems.
Fortunately, many of the scammers aren't to bright either and are easily played if they think you're a mark. I get those calls every now and then and drew with them until they are clearly really pissed. Then I tell them I'm bored and thank them for the free entertainment. That causes them to blow a gasket and I start laughing and hang up. You can go many ways with the game and if you slowly and progressively win their trust ask all kinds of strange questions.
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I'm an admin, so that probably accounts for a lot of my perspective. I judge a system by more than how convenient it is for me. Most systems have good and bad parts and I've rarely used something I couldn't find both the good and the flaws in. It's not totally unfair to call me a Unix geek, Linux zealot, Apple fanboi and MS shill if you must, they've all helped me earn a paycheck. Even Xenix and SCO had good points. About the only OS I didn't care for at
Good! I hope they burn. (Score:3)
BOTH of this shit companies have damaged clients of mine and cost them insane amounts of money to repair the crap they broke.
Luckily they never got far enough in with my customers that they could damage their backups. So actual business data loss was minimal...
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Agreed. They desperately need to burn in hell.
I've been blessed by customers who contact me when they get suspicious calls or emails, and can be trained to not click on scareware popups. When a computer is infected, it's almost always because someone's kid got access to it. But I still deeply resent these scam calls. They're directly interfering with *my* livelihood!
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Go ahead. You stick your wang in that bit o crazy. I'll pass.
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This isn't free speech. Freedom of speech means that you can stand on a street corner, speak your mind, and the government can't say "We don't like your opinion so we're sending you to jail." Freedom of speech doesn't mean that you can lie to people to get money from them. This is called fraud and is illegal. Try claiming "free speech" if you are on trial for fraud and you'll see how quickly the judge brings the hammer down on you.
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There are always issues. If that's how you define free speech, it's interesting to see how broadly fraud can be defined.
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freedom of speech does not extend to the right to commit fraud.
About time! (Score:3)
"Hello I am being Jim and I am with the Microsoft. I am calling you to tell you that your computer is infested with the viruses."
Alternately it's "The Internet" rather than "The Microsoft". (For some reason, you have to include the "The" both for Microsoft and viruses.)
Man, they're annoying. I'm not sure why I find them more unbearable than the usual offshore telemarketer. Perhaps because the lies are so brazen. The last time, I asked him if his mother knows he cheats people out of money for a living? He insisted no, he's trying to help me! He got really excited about it. Probably because he desperately needed this call's rupee for food that night.
Surveying friends and family (including a couple hundred facebook friends), calls at first seemed random, but in more recent months, appear to specifically be targeting people over 50. The most recent calls have asked for me by name. This leads me to believe that they're using someone's pilfered (or purchased?) address list. Has AARP had any breaches lately?
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It might be worth getting that scam call if only to reply: "The Elders of the Internet know who I am?!!!"
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Surveying friends and family (including a couple hundred facebook friends), calls at first seemed random, but in more recent months, appear to specifically be targeting people over 50. The most recent calls have asked for me by name. This leads me to believe that they're using someone's pilfered (or purchased?) address list. Has AARP had any breaches lately?
Curious, what type of lines are the calls coming in on? There's a huge list of folks, mostly over 50, listed by name, freely available to scammers... The White Pages. Many of them are online [verizon.com] and easy to spider. Most telcos still print the physical books, too, although you have to request one now instead of having them dropped off by default. Since these directories are comprised primarily of landlines, it's a safe bet that whoever answers most of the calls will be a baby boomer.
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Landlines, exclusively.
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If they claim that they are from The Microsoft you could say that you are "Bob from the Internet" or vica versa. Spend some time finding out if you have friends in common, maybe from back when you worked at the Facebook. Did they know June from the New York office? Really? Because June died five years ago!! etc etc...
They can be a lot of fun. When you get bored with them just ask how they *feel* about scamming people for money. Good times.
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Surveying friends and family (including a couple hundred facebook friends), calls at first seemed random, but in more recent months, appear to specifically be targeting people over 50. The most recent calls have asked for me by name. This leads me to believe that they're using someone's pilfered (or purchased?) address list. Has AARP had any breaches lately?
You're right regarding age - they've hung up on me in the past if I've sounded too youthful, so when I'm trying to get a scammer to stay on the line, I make my voice all quavery like an old man.
I have a friend who signed me up for a free trial of adult diapers as an April Fool's joke... my guess is that's how they got my number.
Incidentally, the Fake name generator [fakenamegenerator.com] is great for keeping them on the line for a long time, giving fake credit card numbers and addresses until they catch on.
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The calls I've received say something like (in an Indian accent) "This is Robert from Windows, we are calling because it has been reported your computer has errors and is sending them over the Internet."
I've also given them the "Does your mother know what you do for a living?" line. They try to justify what they're doing and I cut them off and say "You're a scammer and you're stealing people's money and you should be ashamed." That's when they hang up.
Anyway TFA doesn't specifically say this operation is
But Geek Squad is still safe? (Score:1)
right?
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yep, and keep the bend radius over five inches.
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at least they are doing it your face and selling real software but Norton is a bloated POS and there real name is the UPSELL squad
just kill them (Score:1)
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> I am so fucking sick of people walking into my repair shop and telling me I'm wrong, they're not scammers, they didn't fall for anything, and they don't want to lose their alleged lifetime membership to unlimited support.
At that point I say "I can't do anything for you. Thanks for dropping by."
Re:just kill them (Score:4, Informative)
been here too. Someone walks in with a computer and a subscription to some nanny software (big name, can't remember it. Net Nanny? No, one of the other ones). Says it's riddled with pop ups. Five minutes in and I've isolated the problem to a redirect to a proxy (clearly in an attempt to get around the softwall), I tell her, "This should have been blocked by the software you've got installed." Asked ME for her money back, I'm like, "You didn't buy it off me, I'm not a software vendor for a start and for two, I don't have a support contract with these guys."
At which point, she takes her computer and leaves, comes back three hours later with a trading standards officer in tow. I tell him what I told her. Not my problem, she's trying to get her computer fixed for free after the software she paid for elsewhere failed to do what she expected.
TSO leaves.
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Expect the next tier of fraudsters to fill the gap (Score:3)
This kind of fraud is much like multi-level marketers and other spammers.I'm afraid that those fradulent companies which are even less traceable, and have overseas offices to avoid US prosecution, will fill the ecological niche very quickly.
More importantly.... (Score:1)
Have I answered your questions satisfactorily and offered good customer service?!
http://cart.mn/CstmrServc [cart.mn]
Government jackboots (Score:2)
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Only had one call and laughed... (Score:2)
...in his ear. He said a problem was detected on my Window's computer. Being every box in my house is running one Linux distro or another I had a problem picking myself up off the floor. Just think of how many people would fall for these scams if everyone really had Window's on some device in their house.
About damn time! (Score:3)
As recently as this week I've still been getting one of those goddamn calls every couple days. I just hang up on them, usually after saying something along the lines of "Do me a favor and kindly jump up your own ass."
My father gets them too... He likes to string the bastards along for a while though. Constantly asking them stuff like where they're calling from and why, requesting specifics until he catches them contradicting themselves and then tells them off and hangs up. (Personally, it drives me nuts listening to him do that, I'm just like "Oh my god hang up on those assholes already!") He does the same thing to the medicaid scam phonecalls but those are far less frequent.
How to hurt them? (Score:1)
Of course, once enough people were using this exact scam on the scammers, they'd know that anyone giving them this routine was to be hung up on. I'm certainly not willing to in
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"Hold on, I'll get my credit card". Go to bathroom with telephone, hold it so the scammer gets an earful. Extra points for a #2. "Sorry, I had to go potty. Oh, I just remembered, my PC runs openSUSE and that's not a real Windows, is it?"
Just wait for tech support to call you (Score:2)
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/thread
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I hope you're not that blind to miss the obvious answer, here.
Make shitty scareware to get you to download the REAL spyware.