MY PC HAS 32,539 ERRORS: HOW TELEPHONE SUPPORT SCAMS REALLY WORK

Fake security products, pushed by variations on black hat SEO and social media spam, constitute a highly adaptive, longstanding and well-documented area of cybercriminal activity. By comparison, lo-tech Windows support scams receive far less attention from the security industry, probably because they’re seen as primarily social engineering and not really susceptible to a technical ‘anti-scammer’ solution. Yet they’ve been a consistent source of fraudulent income for some time, and have quietly increased in sophistication. In this paper, we consider: 1. The evolution of the FUD and Blunder approach to cold-calling support scams, from ‘Microsoft told us you have a virus’ to more technically sophisticated hooks such as deliberate misinterpretation of output from system utilities such as Event Viewer and ASSOC.