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On Sat, Jul 16, 2016 at 05:27:43PM +0100, Andrew Pearce wrote: > A few years ago there was a post on the lug from someone who had > carried the pretence as far as possible and learned what they do. It > seems they ask you to type something that brings up a message on the > screen that is rarely seen and they say yes that confirms there is a > virus and they offer to remove it for money. At that point he switched > off. I can't remember more but it is in the archive somewhere. That probably was me. There are all sorts of tricks to convince people they have a "virus problem", all bogus but all credible if you don't know what's going on. One common trick is to make you open the eventviewer (eventvwr) which is some kind of logging feature. A typical conversation would go like "Do you see any errors, sir?" "Yes, I do." "Can you count them for me?" "Oh, there are many of them!" "Like ten? Or a hundred?" "Definitely several hundreds." "Oh dear, that is really bad." etc. (Errors in the eventviewer are often harmless.) Actually, I did continue after they started asking for money and at least twice I convinced them I paid (once by giving them a fake credit card number that happened to be valid and once by convincing them I would pay later). What happened was that they ran a few free security/performance tools and that's it. Note: don't try this at home unless you know what you're doing and have a virtual machine set up for the purpose. There have been reports of support scammers who started deleting files of people who didn't want to pay. BTW, these days it's more common, especially in the US, for dodgy or compromised websites to display warnings (or fake Blue Screen of Deaths) with a phone number, so thay you call them and they know you have a problem. Also, while I had quite a bit of fun playing with them (and given that I work in IT security, it was even relevant), these scammers don't make a lot of money and your time is probably worth more than theirs. So keeping them busy isn't necessarily a good way to defeat them. I was sad when I moved and lost my phone number, which had been registered with them as gullible. I do miss them sometimes. Martijn.
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