Tech Support Scams
These days, scammers are bombarding our phones more than ever, and it has never been more important to educate yourself about phone scams and their consequences.
Tech support scams are some of the worst you can meet with because they aim directly to steal money from you.
How to spot a tech support scam?
It may look very innocently at the beginning. You receive an email or text message saying your subscription needs to be renewed or was renewed by accident. If you don't want to lose your money and potentially get a refund, you have to act now. The purpose of initial contact is to lure you to call back, and if you are on the line, the scam technique begins.
If you don't know what to do now, the risk of losing money is very high!
What is a tech support scam?
At first, it is necessary to say that tech support scam primarily targets older people or people with no or minimal computer technical skills.
Their goal is to persuade you it is necessary to connect to your device via the remote desktop software. The reasons vary. For example, security issues with your computer, or they need to verify the ongoing payment (refund).
They use various scam techniques to steal your money after they have control over your computer.
a) Threats of virus infection
In this case, they open the command line and manually write some sentences to pretend many viruses are infecting your computer or many IP addresses are connected to your network and stealing your data.
b) Refund / renewal of unused services
The goal here is to persuade you to log in to your bank account so they can send and verify the refunded payment. When sending the payment, your display suddenly goes black, so you can't see what they are doing (according to them, it is perfectly normal, but NO, IT's NOT). When you see nothing, they change the HTML code in your browser, so it will look like you got the payment, but it is never the promised amount. It is always much higher, like 10x times or more.
Now it is time for them to play your feelings because you cannot just send the payment back, then they will lose their job! You need to find a different way of payment.
REMEMBER! They never sent you the payment! IF you refresh (hit the F5 button) the page, you immediately see that the "payment line" is now gone.
c) Instaling software to block your computer
This is the worst-case scenario. They installed a virus and blocked your computer. Your documents and all other data are inaccessible. Now they force you to pay a large amount of money for unblocking. While it will still cost you money, it is always better to immediately turn off the computer and call real IT support so they can clean it and repair it.
The common fact of all of these techniques is the untraceable payment method. They will never accept a bank transfer or check because they need a payment method that is less likely or impossible to trace, like GIFT CARDS or cryptocurrency.
What should you remember?
- NEVER click any unknown link in an email or text message! It can install the blocking virus immediately!
- ALWAYS hang up on them and block that phone number! It is the safest way to protect yourself from being scammed.
- NEVER let anybody remotely connect to your computer unless it is a person you know very well or verified IT support.
ALWAYS try to follow our GOLDEN RULES to protect against phone spam and scam.
Phone Numbers Reported for Tech Support Scam
Be very careful when these phone numbers ever call or text you!