Category: Fight Back

Ollie and The Microsoft Scammer

phone-449836_640

A guest post by Ollie

Ollie says he rarely engages with scam callers, but last week he did.

“I had that scam caller that purports to be from Microsoft and telling you that you have a virus on your PC. Ok, so I thought let’s talk:

Me – “Oh so I have a virus and you really are Microsoft calling me, wow, thank you. Where are you actually ringing from?”

“the USA”

Me –  “ha, yes I guessed that Microsoft is a huge American company, but where, what address in America”

“Los Angeles”

Me – “OK, Los Angeles, I was just wondering what address”

“I don’t know just in USA”

Me – “You don’t know where you are working from?”

“Microsoft in America”

Me – “Yes I know, you said, but can you tell me the street and building in Los Angeles”

“No, I don’t know”

Me – “You don’t know where you actually are in Los Angeles. Are you sure you are in Los Angeles? Not perhaps Seattle where Microsoft are based?”

“No”

Me – “I think you are trying to scam people and I do not want to talk to you anymore. I will just wish you and your company lots of BAD luck, bye”

 

By the way I only did this because I saw his caller ID showing starting with a number 1 so I believed it would cost them to hang on………

 

This is a common scam – do not believe a caller who tells you that your computer has a virus or has been hacked or is being used for illegal purposes or anything similar. They are just calling randomly in the hope of finding someone with a computer who will fall for the lies and then end up paying the scammer to fix non existent problems.

FBI Take-Down of Fake Security Software Sellers

FBI_seal

In 2011, an FBI and international cybercrime initiative set out to seek and disrupt hacker organizations.

Operation Trident Tribunal was born, which included the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice and  authorities from many other countries including Canada, Cyprus, France, Germany, Latvia, the Ukraine, Lithuania, The Netherlands, Romania, Sweden and the United Kingdom. Operation Trident Tribunal targeted specific sophisticated business enterprise believed to have the ability to steal millions and found to be associated with criminal gangs responsible for selling $72 million in fake Antivirus programs to over 960,000 computer users.

The money was made by selling software that claimed to find security risks on PCs and then asked for cash to fix the non-existent problems.

Operation Trident Tribunal, seized more than 40 computers used to host Web pages and conduct fake scans designed to scare people into believing they needed to purchase bogus security software to clean their systems. Raids conducted in Latvia enabled police to seize five bank accounts that were apparently used to funnel money to one gang of scammers; other accounts were seized in Cyprus. Latvian authorities also arrested two people accused of running one of the gangs.

The FBI says users were victimized by the scheme, paying prices of up to $129 for fake software to resolve the problems.

Good riddance to a lot of thieves and their scam.

Doorstep Cold Caller Warning Signs

Doorstep or cold calling is the act of making uninvited visits to your home with the intention of selling goods or services. It is not illegal and does not require a licence.
Door step cold caller sticker scheme.

cold_callers_sign

Are you fed up with receiving visits to your home from cold calling traders?

Are you concerned about rogue traders calling on your elderly or vulnerable neighbours, seeking work?

If so, say “no” to cold calling doorstep traders with a Trading Standards door sticker.

This sticker initiative is designed to empower residents, giving them the confidence to deal with cold calling traders. Traders should respect your wishes but if they don’t, they may be liable to prosecution for ignoring your request to leave and not return.

How do you get a sticker?

Sticker packs can be collected from your local district council, police station or library. If you have any trouble getting a sticker pack, please contact Trading Standards. You can find details of your nearest Trading Standards office by entering your postcode at https://www.gov.uk/find-local-trading-standards-office

Register your sticker

You can register your stickers online.

Registering your sticker pack enables the council to gauge their popularity and success at deterring cold callers  and identify neighbourhoods where stickers are not being displayed and attempt to increase take up in those areas.

Trading Standards Newsletter

Many Trading Standards offices publish regular newsletter including information on scams and rogue traders.

Check the online details for your nearest Trading Standards office.

Q. What should you do if my sticker is ignored?

Unfortunately, not all cold calling traders will respect your wishes and some will ignore your sticker. If this happens, try complaining to the company and ask them not to visit you again in the future.

Also send a copy of the letter to Trading Standards.

Royal Mail Opt Out of Junk Mail Deliveries

spam-964521_640

Royal Mail deliver letters and parcels to your door every day, but they also drop lots of leaflets and other unaddressed mail through your letterbox.

They have an opt-out service you can sign up to stop them leaving you this stuff, but you don’t see this service advertised ever.  They make too much money from leafleting for them to advertise how to stop it.

Royal Mail say their Door-to-Door Opt-Out is a free service that will stop unsolicited, unaddressed mail delivered by the postman. Signing up to the scheme is the single most effective measure you can take to reduce junk mail.

Now Royal Mail has never done much to promote its opt-out scheme for leaflets and as a result few people know it even exists. Yet, the opt-out scheme will prevent leaflets in with your post, these are mostly from  household name companies such as Virgin Media, BT, Sky, Talk Talk, Farmfoods, Pizza places, Morrisons and sometimes local companies.

There are two types of junk mail

  1. direct mail addressed to an individual
  2. door to door mail marked for “the occupier”

It’s the second type that this opt out can remove but the first type will always get through. The Royal Mail say that ‘The Occupier’ type mail is only 25% of the total junk mail.

How to Register

On the Royal Mail website, search on “opt out” and you’ll find how to download the PDF form you must fill in and return to Royal Mail.  After two years, Royal Mail will kindly take you off the opt out list without reminding you. So you need to regularly re-register.

The Direct Marketing Association says more than a third of recipients respond “positively” to direct mail, so perhaps some of it is useful.

Twitter Fights Back Against Scammers

twitter-117595_640

Twitter is enormously successful, but this has meant that a whole community of people create and sell dummy Twitter accounts by the thousands, largely to scammers and spammers .

This is a problem for Twitter as they prohibit use of automation to create accounts and the selling of accounts.

Twitter is always looking for better ways to identify these dummy accounts before they are used for sending scams and spam messages.

A group of researchers approached Twitter asking for permission to purchase credentials from a variety of Twitter account merchants. They got their permission and spent $5,000 over ten months buying accounts from at least 27 different underground sellers.

This totalled some 121,000 Twitter accounts at prices from $10 to $200 per thousand.

When you crate a new Twitter account there are two barriers that should stop scammers but they don’t.

First is the Capcha –which is the picture containing numbers and you have to key in the numbers. Computers are very poor at doing these so it prevents an automatic system from making accounts. However, the scammer pay workshops in China, India or eastern Europe to solve the Capchas.

Second is the need for a valid email address but these can be created automatically on services such as Hotmail, so problem solved for the scammers.

The researchers bought a lot of Accounts from the merchants and identified key qualities that were consistently present. This then enabled the creation of profiles for each merchant.

Twitter then used those profiles to delete large numbers of dummy accounts that had been created.

As the merchants typically built up a bank of thousands of accounts before selling, they then hit problems as most of their accounts had become worthless.  The 27 merchants concerned lost a lot of money and their reputations.

The project was a big success.   However checks some months later showed that the merchants were changing their methods and the profiles no longer worked so well in identifying the dummy accounts.

It’s a constant battle for Twitter but they are fighting the good fight.