This article was originally published in April 2013 and has been updated following the arrest of four people in the UK in connected with this scam.Technical support scammer cold calls are when an individual calls the target, claiming to be from tech support at a reputable company and stating they have found malware on the target’s computer. 'Many older people may fall for the trick.' He hopes to educate more people about the scam and try and track down the people behind them. Segura is surprised that this scam – which has been floating around since 2008 – is still going on. If he is saying that you are something then you must be. A male voice replies that the 'technician is always correct. Segura asks the operator who was deleting the files on his computer, and why the technician called him an asshole. Before deleting, he posts 'bye asshole' (sic) in the TeamViewer chat log. The scammer then looks for more ways to corrupt the system, heading to device manager to delete the Ethernet adapter driver.

Segura purposefully enters in wrong banking details knowing it will be rejected.Īt this point, the scammer gets spiteful, takes control of Segura's computer and deletes all of the documents from his computer. They then open up a browser and instruct Segura to enter in his personal information, including banking information and make a PayPal payment of $299. Segura is asked to download TeamViewer to allow a third party to control his computer. But part of the plan is on Microsoft for having errors that look like this. Segura explains: 'The woman really wanted me to be involved and count the errors. 'You have 100 hacking files on your computer, you are very high risk.' She warned not to delete any of the files as they could be activated and crash the computer. She said that these were 'malicious hacking files that are making the computer infected and the system slow'. She then instructed Segura to enter in 'Prefetch' into the start>run menu, which opens up the prefetch folder, which actually keeps track of how your computer starts and which programs you commonly open. These are major problems and it doesn't matter if you have one or two errors or more than that.Įach one has already started corrupting your whole computer system.' She asked him to count the number of red cross-marked errors and yellow warnings, before warning him: 'These errors and warnings are very much harmful for your computer. The caller – initially a woman – directs Segura to look at his Event Viewer, which logs all Microsoft error reports. As soon as Segura received a call, he decided to turn on his virtual machine and start recording the call and his computer screen.

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