We tried the number on many occasions and we always got redirected to the same ‘help desk’ which consistently recommended that one tech support company: E-Racer Tech (AKA Clean IT PC). Second attempt: once again, the technician has absolutely no problem with his company’s phone number being printed on a fraudulent webpage.Ī third and final attempt to give him a chance to change his mind failed miserably.
#Is software pro world legit windows#
Technician: Because they wanted you to call someone at Windows and have them run a diagnostic on the system. Question: Why is your phone number on there? Question: Can we trust that this information is correct?įirst attempt at confirming that the page is fake and yet the technician does not budge. Technician: To be honest with you I’m not really sure how Internet Explorer works as far as security goes.įor someone who is supposed to run a security diagnostic this is a shortcoming. Question: So how does it scan to find those things? In case the victim expresses any doubts, the technician does not hesitate to lie even more. Taking advantage of innocent victims and defrauding them of their hard-earned cash and pensions is despicable. It’s almost just like a cancer, it’s going to get down into your system, it’s going to continue to spread and infect more and more files every day until this computer does crash.” To make matters worse the technician went on using metaphors to further drive his point and convey a sense of urgency with the situation: Scammers overseas have used this trick for years and it is really shocking to hear their US counterparts go for it too. The Event Viewer does not show the number of infected files, it is not a virus scanner. “It looks like as of right now you have 127 infected files.” If there were any doubts left with the legitimacy of this technician, they became squashed in a matter of seconds: Microsoft has stated many times that “ You will never receive a legitimate call from Microsoft or our partners to charge you for computer fixes.“ Now when they ran the diagnostic, any machine that showed to have the virus or signs of the virus, they went ahead and received a warning so they could go ahead and call in and make them fully aware of what is going on with your machine.” “Microsoft wanted to run a diagnostic on all of its machines. “It is a spyware infection, it’s very similar to the infection that got into Target’s systems a couple months back, as well it also got into eBay’s systems last week.”īut why are users receiving such warnings directly onto their computers in the first place? The warning page is essentially a launchpad for the technician to talk about online threats, giving examples of recent attacks and eventually scare the user: Those who take the bait will call the 1-800 number to speak with a technician and this is where their real troubles begin. Instead you need to forcefully ‘kill’ the browser either via TaskManager or other Windows utilities. In fact, the pages themselves are designed in such a way that you cannot close them by clicking the ‘X’. Upon seeing the warning message, many people may feel as though there is really something wrong with their machine. There were 11.6 million visits in June to. To get an idea of how popular these scamming pages are, take a look at some stats (courtesy of SimilarWeb): Sites are typically registered anonymously via a proxy (WHOISGUARD PROTECTED, Domains By Proxy, LLC).
Here is a list of URLs we have found with a similar theme (we publish it here so that other people can blacklist them as well): hxxp://hxxp://hxxp:///
You may come across them as you are browsing the net, especially on sites that have a poor reputation. There is an ongoing and strong affiliate campaign pushing these warnings. “Your personal and financial information may not be secured.” “The system may have found (2) viruses that pose a serious threat . “For emergency tech support call immediately” The following are fraudulent sites that display a warning message and play sound effects with the goal of scaring the user and making them believe that their computer is infected. It turned out that their company was based in ‘ the sunshine state‘ of Florida, USA. When we rang the number, we were surprised to hear that the technician sounded American. Indeed all of the tech support scams we have tracked so far were with companies located either in Mumbai, Kolkata or elsewhere in India. But last month, we stumbled upon fake warning pages urging users to call a number for ’emergency tech support’. Most people associate tech support scams (AKA the fake Microsoft support call) with technicians sitting in a crowded and buzzing boiler room somewhere offshore.
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