"While paying for ads requires a certain budget, ads have the advantage of funnelling higher quality prospects because people are actually already experiencing an issue," Segura explains on a blog post by Malwarebytes explaining how tech support scams have gone mobile.
Segura recorded a video of the Android support scan in progress which can be found below.įraudsters behind the same are showing a willingness to speculate in order to accumulate.
"Keep in mind that those miscreants have direct access to your computer and data – with all the risks that this entails," Segura warns. And the problem doesn't even stop at the rip off fee. In the example caught by Segura, the dodgy support organisation ultimately tried to land him with a $299 bill for one year of so-called support. Many people who aren’t too tech-savvy are likely to take the whole performance at face value before ultimately "paying several hundred dollars for dubious services from rogue technical support companies," Segura concludes. "In this case the technician removed all the ‘infected files’ and simulated a ‘re-infection’ by quickly restoring them from the Recycle Bin (Ctrl+Z trick)." The ripoff phase "Windows prefetch files are often used by scammers to make up non-existing threats," Segura explained. The scammer then proceeded with an attempt to hoodwink Segura by using a Windows feature designed to allow users to restore files from trash in an attempt to falsely portray his system as riddled with malware. The technician went on to claim that a file – rundll32.exe, a standard Windows executable – was installed on the Android device as well as the PC and is a "very bad file". What actually happened was that after browsing the phone’s internal storage and checking its properties they asserted that there was some sort of infection on the device, and that pop-up permission screens for Adobe Flash or similar were evidence of this.
The "support technicians" who answered the phone when Segura called one of these numbers informed him they weren't able to directly connect to his smartphone, instructing him to plug it into his computer before asking him to download remote login software (specifically LogMeIn).Īt this point a genuine technician might be expected to run some sort of a scan or diagnostic on a connected phone. The top two results for the search query “android slow tech support” from an Android tablet featured paid ads for an online tech support page promoting an 1-800 number.
One example of mobile tech support scams identified by Segura is being promoted using Bing search results for Android support.
Victims are roped in using either cold calling or online advertising. Old dogs, old tricks, new platformĪs before, the short con relies on social engineering techniques to create the perception of severe (in reality, imaginary) problems in urgent need of fixing. Jérôme Segura, senior security researcher at Malwarebytes, has followed up that research by uncovering a tech support scam (also known as the infamous fake Microsoft/Windows support technician call) targeting Android tablet and smartphone users.