Pity the poor employees of companies like “Windows Technical Support"—scammers who make money by "fixing" computers that were never broken in the first place. For the people who pose as Windows support technicians and cold call unsuspecting victims to warn them about bogus viruses, life is good as long as they can wrangle credit card numbers and remote PC access from the gullible.
The scammer—who is generally from India but claims to live in the same country as the victim—tells whoever picks up the phone that their computer has been identified as having a virus. The scammer directs the user to look in the Windows Event Viewer, which shows a generally harmless list of error messages, and then says that this is a sign of serious infection. From there, the scammer convinces his mark to install a piece of software allowing remote access into the computer to clean up the problem, and to pay several hundred dollars in fees for the service. It's often known as the "ammyy" scam because users are sometimes directed to www.ammyy.com to install the remote desktop software.
Not everyone falls for it. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) didn’t, last week busting six fake tech support companies with names like Virtual PC Solutions and PCCare247 after having undercover agents pose as victims. Ars editor Nate Anderson didn’t fall for it, either, playing a helpless victim on the phone for 15 minutes before revealing that he knew what had been going on the whole time.
But the serious "scam trolls" elevate scammer-baiting to an art form, sometimes wasting as much as two hours on the phone as they see just how long a scammer will stay on the line. The tech support scam is an international phenomenon, and the scam trolls likewise come from across the globe. Many record their interactions with the scammers and post them for the world to hear—and learn from. Here's how the masters do it.
Please wait two hours while my dial-up connects to CompuServe
While some troll scammers as a public service to prevent people from being victimized, others are simply out for laughs. Case in point: a person calling himself "Ted" kept a scammer on the phone for nearly two hours, recording the last 43 minutes and posting them to SoundCloud last week.
“Thank you for two hours of your time, you dumb motherf****r”
A good troll is a prepared troll, and Ted was ready. He dragged out the call by pretending to connect his Windows 95 and Windows Vista computers to CompuServe via dial-up Internet, by providing an expired credit card number, and by providing absurd answers to basic questions.
Ted spent much of his call pretending to struggle to connect to the Internet. "OK, so you want me to connect to the Internet with this. God, it’s an hour and eight minutes we’ve been on the phone, this is taking forever. All right, hold on, so this is called—I need to connect it to the phone. It's called an acoustic coupler… Hold on one second. All right, it's not connecting to my CompuServe account for some reason. Let me try my AOL account, hold on."
Ted switched back and forth between his Windows 95 and Windows Vista computers. On Vista, Ted claimed he couldn't follow the scammer's instructions until he finished installing the non-existent Service Pack 3 (Vista only has two service packs).
Ted asked the scammer if he could make his Windows 95 computer run as fast as his Windows Vista one, and professed his desire to be a good citizen. "I want this machine to be secured, for sure," he said. "And I don’t want my machine being dangerous, for sure, I mean that would be bad, that would be very bad, I don’t want it to be bad, I want it to be good. I’m a responsible Internet user, I don’t want to be some of these hacker types that infect the Web and stuff like that."
The scammer tried to direct Ted to the ammyy website:
Ted: So, I’m connected to CompuServe. What now, what do you need me to do?
Scammer: I need you to open the website, www.
Ted: Hold on. www, d-o-t
Scammer: No, it's not d-o-t. It's www. Full stop.
Ted: Www dot full stop, yup.
Scammer: Sir, it's not like that, it's not like that. Sir, how do you open up any website, sir? www.google.com. www.yahoo.com?
Ted: Yes. Oh, I see what you're saying. I was confused, sorry. So what site do I open? You want me to go to fullstop.com?
Scammer: Sorry?
Ted: You said to go to fullstop.com, right?
Scammer: No. No sir. www.ammyy.com.
Through it all, Ted periodically replays the dial-up modem connection sound when he has to "reconnect," tells the scammer he doesn't have Internet Explorer but uses Mosaic to surf the Web, and claims to be worried about his online banking because he wants to move a large amount of money out of his account. After initially providing an expired credit card number, Ted gives the scammer a real one—or at least one that sounds authentic enough for the scammer to start verifying Ted's birth date and other information.
Scammer: Confirm your date of birth, please.
Ted: Oh yes.
Scammer: Will you confirm it please?
Ted: Did you give it to me? What is it, what do you have?
Scammer: No, you need to tell me your date of birth.
Ted: OK. Oh, you want my date of birth right now. It’s June.
Scammer: June?
Ted: Yes.
Scammer: Ok, like, uh, June 12th , June 10th, when is it, sir?
Ted: Oh yes. June 12th.
Scammer: Can you confirm me the year?
Ted: 1950.
Suddenly, Ted is claiming to be hot and tense and says, "I need to take off my pants, it's way too hot." Next, he tells the scammer to address him less formally.
"You don’t have to keep calling me 'sir,'" Ted said. "I mean, we’ve been on the phone an hour and 50 minutes together. My friends call me 'Cinnamon.' If you want to call me Cinnamon, that’s fine." (The scammer actually starts calling Ted "Cinnamon.")
Once the scammer says Ted will have to pay $700 to fix his computer and for ongoing support, Ted tells him to add $50 for himself because of how helpful he's been. The scammer happily accepts the tip... just before Ted concludes with a brutal, "Thank you for two hours of your time, you dumb motherfucker," and hangs up the phone.
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