A different Kind of Tech Support Scam

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Hello I'm New here! Joined: 27 Jun 2018 Posts: 8

The last couple days I keep getting a call from a (202-Washington) number and I decided to call it back with a "burner" app on my phone. (by the way, do any of you use such apps and if so do you have any you'd recommend?) Long story short, his (African/Nigerian?) accent was pretty thick, but essentially, he wanted me to give him my website address and I made one up on the fly, protec1337.com. He goes there and sees that "the site is not coming up" and then says this may be due to hackers or malware. I keep playing along as the dumb guy who had someone else do my website and that I just pay the bill, but he requested that I provide him my CPanel login info so that he could go in there and "look at the code". It wouldn't be until then that he could give me a quote on how much it would cost to fix it. I should add that I gave him one of my scambaiting emails, to which he sent a blank email to, I am sure to make sure I gave him a valid address, so we do have that form of communication as well.

I have not heard of this before and now I am wondering if there's a way to whip up a fake site for him to "check for hackers and malware". I do have a server with a hosting company with my business site on it, but that's not an option, since he would be able to see the other domains I have on the same account. Any ideas on how to handle this one?

Posted: Wed Aug 01, 2018 1:16 pm

As has been stated here before, we do not deal with IRS / Tech Support scammers here.

As bware419ers posted...

bware419ers wrote:

There are several reasons why you won't find those here.

We deal with Advance Fee Fraud (often referred to as 419 based on the Nigerian Criminal Code regulating this). These Tech Support (and IRS) scams are not AFF.
These types of scams almost always begin with the scammer calling their victims, making it impossible to bait safe at the entry level. We preach safety to the nth degree here. A call to a number connected to real life throws this right out the window.

These lads love their revenge, too! See:

https://consumerist.com/2016/02/11/diabolical-irs-phone-scammers-call-swat-team-tell-victim-theyre-there-to-collect/
http://wjla.com/news/crime/irs-scammers-swatting-against-people-who-discover-their-phone-schemes-114088
http://wavy.com/2014/09/16/police-irs-scammers-responsible-for-hoax-swat-call/
http://www.postbulletin.com/news/crime/scammer-gets-revenge-with-bomb-threat/article_b6f83e37-4adf-52be-8327-9bf366f23089.html
We wouldn't consider this "baiting" as we define it. It's much more akin to one-off harassment. Sure, you might be able to get them into long conversations but it's a total dead-end in the normal baiting sense. If it does go anywhere, and you invite the scammer into your computer/VM (again, remember that safety issue?), these lead to illegal activities we do not advocate. Period.

The calls lead to few places and generally educate the caller instead of the psychological manipulation we prefer.
There are a ton of other places that would be happy to discuss this. We don't need to be one of them as we have our hands full already.

Locking.

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