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A technical support scam, or tech support scam, is a type of
fraud In law, fraud is intentional deception to secure unfair or unlawful gain, or to deprive a victim of a legal right. Fraud can violate civil law (e.g., a fraud victim may sue the fraud perpetrator to avoid the fraud or recover monetary compen ...
in which a scammer claims to offer a legitimate
technical support Technical support (abbreviated as tech support) is a call centre type customer service provided by companies to advise and assist registered users with issues concerning their technical products. Traditionally done on the phone, technical suppor ...
service. Victims contact scammers in a variety of ways, often through fake pop-ups resembling error messages or via fake "help lines" advertised on
website A website (also written as a web site) is a collection of web pages and related content that is identified by a common domain name and published on at least one web server. Examples of notable websites are Google, Facebook, Amazon, and W ...
s owned by the scammers. Technical support scammers use social engineering and a variety of
confidence trick A confidence trick is an attempt to defraud a person or group after first gaining their trust. Confidence tricks exploit victims using their credulity, naïveté, compassion, vanity, confidence, irresponsibility, and greed. Researchers h ...
s to persuade their victim of the presence of problems on their
computer A computer is a machine that can be programmed to carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations ( computation) automatically. Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic sets of operations known as programs. These prog ...
or
mobile device A mobile device (or handheld computer) is a computer small enough to hold and operate in the hand. Mobile devices typically have a flat LCD or OLED screen, a touchscreen interface, and digital or physical buttons. They may also have a physica ...
, such as a
malware Malware (a portmanteau for ''malicious software'') is any software intentionally designed to cause disruption to a computer, server, client, or computer network, leak private information, gain unauthorized access to information or systems, depr ...
infection, when there are no issues with the victim's device. The scammer will then persuade the victim to pay to fix the fictitious "problems" that they claim to have found. Payment is made to the scammer through ways which are hard to trace and have fewer
consumer protection Consumer protection is the practice of safeguarding buyers of goods and services, and the public, against unfair practices in the marketplace. Consumer protection measures are often established by law. Such laws are intended to prevent business ...
s in place which could allow the victim to claim their money back, usually through gift cards. Technical support scams have occurred as early as 2008. A 2017 study of technical support scams found that of the IPs that could be geolocated, 85% could be traced to locations in India, 7% to locations in the United States and 3% to locations in Costa Rica. Research into tech support scams suggests that
millennials Millennials, also known as Generation Y or Gen Y, are the Western demographic cohort following Generation X and preceding Generation Z. Researchers and popular media use the early 1980s as starting birth years and the mid-1990s to early 20 ...
and those in
generation Z Generation Z (or more commonly Gen Z for short), colloquially known as zoomers, is the Western demographic cohort succeeding Millennials and preceding Generation Alpha. Researchers and popular media use the mid-to-late 1990s as starting birt ...
have the highest exposure to such scams; however, senior citizens are more likely to lose money to tech support scams. Technical support scams were named by Norton as the top
phishing Phishing is a type of social engineering where an attacker sends a fraudulent (e.g., spoofed, fake, or otherwise deceptive) message designed to trick a person into revealing sensitive information to the attacker or to deploy malicious softwa ...
threat to
consumer A consumer is a person or a group who intends to order, or uses purchased goods, products, or services primarily for personal, social, family, household and similar needs, who is not directly related to entrepreneurial or business activities. ...
s in October 2021;
Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washi ...
found that 60% of consumers who took part in a survey had been exposed to a technical support scam within the previous twelve months. Responses to technical support scams include
lawsuit - A lawsuit is a proceeding by a party or parties against another in the civil court of law. The archaic term "suit in law" is found in only a small number of laws still in effect today. The term "lawsuit" is used in reference to a civil act ...
s brought against companies responsible for running fraudulent call centres and scam baiting.


Origin and distribution

The first tech support scams were recorded in 2008. Technical support scams have been seen in a variety of countries, including the
United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country Continental United States, primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., ...
,
Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by to ...
,
United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and ...
,
Ireland Ireland ( ; ga, Éire ; Ulster-Scots: ) is an island in the North Atlantic Ocean, in north-western Europe. It is separated from Great Britain to its east by the North Channel, the Irish Sea, and St George's Channel. Ireland is the s ...
,
Australia Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands. With an area of , Australia is the largest country by ...
,
New Zealand New Zealand ( mi, Aotearoa ) is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island () and the South Island ()—and over 700 smaller islands. It is the sixth-largest island coun ...
,
India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, seventh-largest country by area, the List of countries and dependencies by population, second-most populous ...
and
South Africa South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the southernmost country in Africa. It is bounded to the south by of coastline that stretch along the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans; to the north by the neighbouring coun ...
. A 2017 study of technical support scams published at the NDSS Symposium found that, of the tech support scams in which the IPs involved could be geolocated, 85% could be traced to locations in India, 7% to locations in the United States and 3% to locations in Costa Rica. India has millions of
English speakers English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, with its earliest forms spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England. It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to the i ...
who are competing for relatively few jobs. One municipality had 114 jobs and received 19,000 applicants. This high level of
unemployment Unemployment, according to the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), is people above a specified age (usually 15) not being in paid employment or self-employment but currently available for work during the refe ...
serves as an incentive for tech scamming jobs, which are often well-paid. Additionally, scammers exploit the levels of unemployment by offering jobs to people desperate to be employed. Many scammers do not realise they are applying and being trained for tech support scam jobs, but many decide to stay after finding out the nature of their job as they feel it is too late to back out of the job and change careers. Scammers are forced to choose between keeping their job or becoming jobless. Some scammers convince themselves that they are targeting wealthy people that have money to spare, which justifies their theft, whilst others see their job as generating "easy money".


Operation

Technical support scams rely on social engineering to persuade victims that their device is infected with malware. Scammers use a variety of confidence tricks to persuade the victim to install remote desktop software, with which the scammer can then take control of the victim's computer. With this access, the scammer may then launch various Windows components and utilities (such as the
Event Viewer Event Viewer is a component of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system that lets administrators and users view the event logs on a local or remote machine. Applications and operating-system components can use this centralized log service to rep ...
), install third-party utilities (such as
rogue security software Rogue security software is a form of malicious software and internet fraud that misleads users into believing there is a virus on their computer and aims to convince them to pay for a fake malware removal tool that actually installs malware on ...
) and perform other tasks in an effort to convince the victim that the computer has critical problems that must be remediated, such as infection with a
virus A virus is a submicroscopic infectious agent that replicates only inside the living cells of an organism. Viruses infect all life forms, from animals and plants to microorganisms, including bacteria and archaea. Since Dmitri Ivanovsk ...
. Scammers target a variety of people, though research by Microsoft suggests that millennials (defined by Microsoft as age 24-37) and people part of generation Z (age 18-23) have the highest exposure to tech support scams and the
Federal Trade Commission The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is an independent agency of the United States government whose principal mission is the enforcement of civil (non-criminal) antitrust law and the promotion of consumer protection. The FTC shares jurisdiction o ...
has found that seniors (age 60 and over) are more likely to lose money to tech support scams. The scammer will urge the victim to pay so the "issues" can be fixed.


Initiation

Technical support scams can begin in a variety of ways. Some variants of the scam are initiated using pop-up advertising on infected websites or via
cybersquatting Cybersquatting (also known as domain squatting) is the practice of registering, trafficking in, or using an Internet domain name, with a bad faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else. The term is derived ...
of major websites. The victim is shown pop-ups which resemble legitimate error messages such as a Blue Screen of Death and freeze the victim's
web browser A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used o ...
. The pop-up instructs the victim to call the scammers via a phone number to fix the "error". Technical support scams can also be initiated via cold calls. These are usually
robocall A robocall is a phone call that uses a computerized autodialer to deliver a pre-recorded message, as if from a robot. Robocalls are often associated with political and telemarketing phone campaigns, but can also be used for public service or em ...
s which claim to be associated with a legitimate third party such as Microsoft or
Apple An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple trees are cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus '' Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, where its wild ancest ...
. Technical support scams can also attract victims by purchasing
keyword advertising Keyword advertising is a form of online advertising in which an advertiser pays to have an advertisement appear in the results listing when a person uses a particular phrase to search the Web, typically by employing a search engine. The particular ...
on major search engines for phrases such as "Microsoft support". Victims who click on these adverts are taken to web pages containing the scammer's phone numbers.


Confidence tricks

Once a victim has contacted a scammer, the scammer will usually instruct them to download and install a remote access program such as TeamViewer,
AnyDesk AnyDesk is a remote desktop application distributed by AnyDesk Software GmbH. The proprietary software program provides platform independent remote access to personal computers and other devices running the host application. It offers remote co ...
, LogMeIn or GoToAssist. The scammer convinces the victim to provide them with the credentials required to initiate a remote-control session, giving the scammer complete control of the victim's desktop. After gaining access, the scammer attempts to convince the victim that the computer is suffering from problems that must be repaired, most often as the putative result of malicious hacking activity. Scammers use several methods to misrepresent the content and significance of common Windows tools and system directories as evidence of malicious activity, such as viruses and other malware. These tricks are meant to target victims who may be unfamiliar with the actual uses of these tools, such as inexperienced users and senior citizens. The scammer then coaxes the victim into paying for the scammer's services or software, which they claim is designed to "repair" or "clean" the computer but is actually malware that infects it or software that causes other damage, or does nothing at all. * The scammer may direct users to Windows' Event Viewer, which displays a
logfile In computing, logging is the act of keeping a log of events that occur in a computer system, such as problems, errors or just information on current operations. These events may occur in the operating system or in other software. A message o ...
of various events for use by system administrators to troubleshoot problems. Although many of the log entries are relatively harmless notifications, the scammer may claim that log entries labeled as warnings and errors are evidence of malware activity or that the computer is becoming corrupted, and must be "fixed". * The scammer may show system folders that contain unusually named files to the victim, such as Windows'
Prefetch Prefetching in computer science is a technique for speeding up fetch operations by beginning a fetch operation whose result is expected to be needed soon. Usually this is before it is ''known'' to be needed, so there is a risk of wasting time by p ...
and Temp folders, and claim that the files are evidence of malware on the victim's computer. The scammer may open some of these files in
Notepad A notebook (also known as a notepad, writing pad, drawing pad, or legal pad) is a book or stack of paper pages that are often ruled and used for purposes such as note-taking, journaling or other writing, drawing, or scrapbooking. History ...
, where the file contents are rendered as
mojibake Mojibake ( ja, 文字化け; , "character transformation") is the garbled text that is the result of text being decoded using an unintended character encoding. The result is a systematic replacement of symbols with completely unrelated ones, oft ...
. The scammer claims that malware has corrupted these files, causing the unintelligible output. In reality, the files in Prefetch are typically harmless, intact binary files used to speed up certain operations. * The scammer may claim that normally disabled services should not be disabled, when not all services need to be enabled. * The scammer may misuse
Command Prompt Command Prompt, also known as cmd.exe or cmd, is the default command-line interpreter for the OS/2, eComStation, ArcaOS, Microsoft Windows (Windows NT family and Windows CE family), and ReactOS operating systems. On Windows CE .NET 4.2, ...
tools to generate suspicious-looking output, for instance using the tree or dir /s command which displays an extensive listing of files and
directories Directory may refer to: * Directory (computing), or folder, a file system structure in which to store computer files * Directory (OpenVMS command) * Directory service, a software application for organizing information about a computer network's ...
. The scammer may claim that the utility is a malware scanner, and while the tool is running the scammer will enter text purporting to be an error message (such as "security breach ... trojans found") that will appear when the job finishes, or into a blank Notepad document. * The scammer may misrepresent values and keys stored in the Windows Registry as being malicious, such as innocuous keys whose values are listed as not being set. * The " Send To" Windows function is associated with a
globally unique identifier A universally unique identifier (UUID) is a 128-bit label used for information in computer systems. The term globally unique identifier (GUID) is also used. When generated according to the standard methods, UUIDs are, for practical purposes, u ...
. The output of the command assoc, which lists all file associations on the system, displays this association with the line ZFSendToTarget=CLSID\; this GUID is the same on all versions of Windows. The scammer may claim that this is a unique ID used to identify the user's computer, before reading out the identifier to "verify" that they are a legitimate support company with information on the victim's computer, or claim that the
CLSID A universally unique identifier (UUID) is a 128-bit label used for information in computer systems. The term globally unique identifier (GUID) is also used. When generated according to the standard methods, UUIDs are, for practical purposes, un ...
listed is actually a "Computer Licence Security ID" that must be renewed. * The scammer may claim that the alleged "problems" are the result of expired hardware or software
warranties In contract law, a warranty is a promise which is not a condition of the contract or an innominate term: (1) it is a term "not going to the root of the contract",Hogg M. (2011). ''Promises and Contract Law: Comparative Perspectives''p. 48 Cambrid ...
, for example, Windows product keys, and coax the victim into paying for a "renewal". * The scammer may block the victim from viewing their screen, claiming that it is the result of malware or of a scan being run, and use the time to search the victim's files for sensitive information, attempt to break into the victim's accounts with stolen or stored credentials or activate the webcam and see the victim's face. * The scammer may run the netstat command in a terminal/command window, which shows local and foreign
IP address An Internet Protocol address (IP address) is a numerical label such as that is connected to a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication.. Updated by . An IP address serves two main functions: network interface ident ...
es. The scammer then tells the victim that these addresses belong to hackers that have gained access to their computer. * The scammer may claim that a legitimate Windows process such as rundll32.exe is a virus. Often, the scammer will search the
web Web most often refers to: * Spider web, a silken structure created by the animal * World Wide Web or the Web, an Internet-based hypertext system Web, WEB, or the Web may also refer to: Computing * WEB, a literate programming system created by ...
for an article about the Windows process and will scroll to a section saying that the process name can also possibly be part of malware, even though the victim's computer does not contain that malware.


Payment and impact

The preferred method of payment in a technical support scam is through
gift cards A gift card also known as gift certificate in North America, or gift voucher or gift token in the UK is a prepaid stored-value money card, usually issued by a retailer or bank, to be used as an alternative to cash for purchases within a parti ...
. Gift cards are favoured by scammers because they are readily available to buy and have less consumer protections in place that could allow the victim to reclaim their money back. Additionally, the usage of gift cards as payment allows the scammers to extract money quickly whilst remaining anonymous. Tech support scammers have also been known to ask for payment in the form of
cryptocurrency A cryptocurrency, crypto-currency, or crypto is a digital currency designed to work as a medium of exchange through a computer network that is not reliant on any central authority, such as a government or bank, to uphold or maintain it. It i ...
, cheques and direct bank transfers made through
automated clearing house An automated clearing house (ACH) is a computer-based electronic network for processing transactions, usually domestic low value payments, between participating financial institutions. It may support both credit transfers and direct debits. T ...
(the latter only gives victims 60 days to recover their funds). If a victim refuses to follow the scammer's instructions or to pay them, scammers have been known to resort to insulting and threatening their victim to procure payment. Crimes threatened to be inflicted on victims or their families by scammers have ranged from
theft Theft is the act of taking another person's property or services without that person's permission or consent with the intent to deprive the rightful owner of it. The word ''theft'' is also used as a synonym or informal shorthand term for som ...
,
fraud In law, fraud is intentional deception to secure unfair or unlawful gain, or to deprive a victim of a legal right. Fraud can violate civil law (e.g., a fraud victim may sue the fraud perpetrator to avoid the fraud or recover monetary compen ...
and
extortion Extortion is the practice of obtaining benefit through coercion. In most jurisdictions it is likely to constitute a criminal offence; the bulk of this article deals with such cases. Robbery is the simplest and most common form of extortion, ...
, to serious crimes such as
rape Rape is a type of sexual assault usually involving sexual intercourse or other forms of sexual penetration carried out against a person without their consent. The act may be carried out by physical force, coercion, abuse of authority, or ...
and
murder Murder is the unlawful killing of another human without justification or valid excuse, especially the unlawful killing of another human with malice aforethought. ("The killing of another person without justification or excuse, especially the ...
.
Canadian Canadians (french: Canadiens) are people identified with the country of Canada. This connection may be residential, legal, historical or cultural. For most Canadians, many (or all) of these connections exist and are collectively the source of ...
citizen Jakob Dulisse reported to CBC that, upon asking the scammer why he had been targeted, the scammer responded with a
death threat A death threat is a threat, often made anonymously, by one person or a group of people to kill another person or group of people. These threats are often designed to intimidate victims in order to manipulate their behaviour, in which case a d ...
; 'Anglo people who travel to the country' (
India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, seventh-largest country by area, the List of countries and dependencies by population, second-most populous ...
) were ' cut up in little pieces and thrown in the river.' Scammers have also been known to lock uncooperative victims out of their computer using the syskey utility (present only in Windows versions previous to
Windows 10 Windows 10 is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It is the direct successor to Windows 8.1, which was released nearly two years earlier. It was released to manufacturing on July 15, 2015, and later to retail on ...
) or third party applications which they install on the victim's computer, and to delete documents and/or programs essential to the operation of the victim's computer if they do not receive payment.
Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washi ...
commissioned a survey by
YouGov YouGov is a British international Internet-based market research and data analytics firm, headquartered in the UK, with operations in Europe, North America, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific. In 2007, it acquired US company Polimetrix, and sinc ...
across 16 countries in July 2021 to research tech support scams and their impact on consumers. The survey found that approximately 60% of consumers who participated had been exposed to a technical support scam within the last 12 months. Victims reported losing an average of 200 USD to the scammers and many faced repeated interactions from other scammers once they had been successfully scammed. Norton named technical support scams as the top phishing threat to consumers in October 2021, having blocked over 12.3 million tech support scam
URLs A Uniform Resource Locator (URL), colloquially termed as a web address, is a reference to a web resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identi ...
between July and September 2021.


Response

Legal action has been taken against some companies carrying out technical support scams. In December 2014, Microsoft filed a lawsuit against a
California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...
-based company operating such scams for "misusing Microsoft's name and trademarks" and "creating security issues for victims by gaining access to their computers and installing malicious software, including a password grabber that could provide access to personal and financial information". In December 2015, the
state of Washington Washington (), officially the State of Washington, is a state in the Pacific Northwest region of the Western United States. Named for George Washington—the first U.S. president—the state was formed from the western part of the Washington ...
sued the firm iYogi for scamming consumers and making false claims in order to scare the users into buying iYogi's diagnostic software. iYogi was also accused of falsely claiming that they were affiliated with Microsoft,
Hewlett-Packard The Hewlett-Packard Company, commonly shortened to Hewlett-Packard ( ) or HP, was an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. HP developed and provided a wide variety of hardware components ...
and
Apple An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple trees are cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus '' Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, where its wild ancest ...
. In September 2011, Microsoft dropped gold partner Comantra from its Microsoft Partner Network following accusations of involvement in cold-call technical-support scams. However, the ease of which companies that carry out technical support scams can be launched makes it difficult to prevent tech support scams from taking place. Major search engines such as Bing and
Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...
have taken steps to restrict the promotion of fake technical support websites through keyword advertising. Microsoft-owned advertising network
Bing Ads Microsoft Advertising (formerly Bing Ads, Microsoft adCenter and MSN adCenter) is a service that provides pay per click advertising on the Bing, Yahoo!, and DuckDuckGo search engines. In 2021, Microsoft Advertising surpassed US$10 billion in annual ...
(which services ad sales on Bing and
Yahoo! Search Yahoo! Search is a Yahoo! internet search provider that uses Microsoft's Microsoft Bing, Bing search engine to power results, since 2009, apart from four years with Google Search, Google until 2019. Originally, "Yahoo! Search" referred to a Yah ...
engines) amended its terms of service in May 2016 to prohibit the advertising of third-party technical support services or ads claiming to "provide a service that can only be provided by the actual owner of the products or service advertised". Google announced a verification program in 2018 in an attempt to restrict advertising for third-party tech support to legitimate companies.


Scam baiting

Tech support scammers are regularly targeted by scam baiting, with individuals seeking to raise awareness of these scams by uploading recordings on platforms like
YouTube YouTube is a global online video sharing and social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by Google, and is the second mo ...
, cause scammers inconvenience by wasting their time and protect potential victims. Advanced scam baiters may infiltrate the scammer's computer, and potentially disable it by deploying RATs, distributed denial of service attacks and destructive malware. Scam baiters may also attempt to lure scammers into exposing their unethical practices by leaving dummy files or malware disguised as confidential information such as credit/debit card information and passwords on a
virtual machine In computing, a virtual machine (VM) is the virtualization/ emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve specialized h ...
, which the scammer may attempt to steal, only to become infected. Sensitive information important to carrying out further investigations by a
law enforcement agency A law enforcement agency (LEA) is any government agency responsible for the enforcement of the laws. Jurisdiction LEAs which have their ability to apply their powers restricted in some way are said to operate within a jurisdiction. LE ...
may be retrieved, and additional information on the rogue firm may then be posted or compiled online to warn potential victims. In March 2020, an anonymous YouTuber under the alias Jim Browning successfully infiltrated and gathered
drone Drone most commonly refers to: * Drone (bee), a male bee, from an unfertilized egg * Unmanned aerial vehicle * Unmanned surface vehicle, watercraft * Unmanned underwater vehicle or underwater drone Drone, drones or The Drones may also refer to: ...
and
CCTV Closed-circuit television (CCTV), also known as video surveillance, is the use of video cameras to transmit a signal to a specific place, on a limited set of monitors. It differs from broadcast television in that the signal is not openly ...
footage of a fraudulent call centre scam operation through the help of fellow YouTube personality
Karl Rock Karl Edward Rice, known online as Karl Rock, is a New Zealand blogger and YouTuber based in India. He is best known for his vlogs, which are centred around his travels in the Indian subcontinent, and his book ''How to Travel in India.'' Early a ...
. Through the aid of the British documentary programme ''
Panorama A panorama (formed from Greek πᾶν "all" + ὅραμα "view") is any wide-angle view or representation of a physical space, whether in painting, drawing, photography, film, seismic images, or 3D modeling. The word was originally coined i ...
'', a police raid was carried out when the documentary was brought to the attention of assistant police commissioner Karan Goel, leading to the arrest of call centre operator Amit Chauhan who also operated a fraudulent travel agency under the name "Faremart Travels".


See also

* Cybercrime in India *
List of confidence tricks Confidence tricks and scams are difficult to classify, because they change often and often contain elements of more than one type. Throughout this list, the perpetrator of the confidence trick is called the "con artist" or simply "artist", and th ...
*
Antivirus software Antivirus software (abbreviated to AV software), also known as anti-malware, is a computer program used to prevent, detect, and remove malware. Antivirus software was originally developed to detect and remove computer viruses, hence the name. ...
*
Advance-fee scam An advance-fee scam is a form of fraud and is one of the most common types of confidence tricks. The scam typically involves promising the victim a significant share of a large sum of money, in return for a small up-front payment, which the frauds ...
* SSA impersonation scam * IRS impersonation scam * Telemarketing fraud * Virus hoax


References


Further reading

*


External links


Official Microsoft support page on technical support scams

Official Symantec support page on technical support scams


by a security research group
Dial One for Scam: A Large-Scale Analysis of Technical Support Scams
{{Scams and confidence tricks Confidence tricks Cybercrime Fraud in India Remote desktop Telephone crimes