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IT Editor for Ars Technica, Sean Gallagher, [Sean Gallagher] was called by "Windows Support" recently and posted a story about how he dragged it out into a two-hour long phone call:
Technical support scams are the bottom of the barrel for cyber-crime. Using well-worn social engineering techniques that generally only work on the least sophisticated computer users, these bootleg call-center operations generally use a collection of commercially available tools to either convince their victims to pay exorbitant fees for "security software" or to extort them to gain control of their computer. And yet, these schemes continue to rake in cash for scammers.
On Monday afternoon, I got a phone call that someone now probably wishes they never made. Caller ID said the call was coming from "MDU Resources," but the caller said he was calling from "the technical support center." He informed me there were "junk files" on my computer slowing it down, and he was going to connect me with a technician to help fix the problem.
I was thrilled, displaying what my wife Paula felt was an inordinate amount of glee about getting the call. Over the next two hours, I subjected the scammers to such misery that Paula later told me she felt bad for them. "They probably had a quota to meet," she said sarcastically. "You probably kept them from getting four or five other people."
The article makes for a good read if you need a chuckle.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 29 2017, @02:52AM
Be careful giving them access to the Internet. While they may not be able to do anything to your computer directly since they're trapped in the virtual machine they still may be able to do something illegally over the Internet within the virtual machine on your IP address and get you in trouble. Especially if they run malware on the virtual machine, the malware may let them do stuff over the Internet in the background. Or they can maybe access the rest of your network if you're not careful about your setup? The computer that the virtual machine is on is presumably on the same network?
(Score: 2) by sjames on Sunday January 29 2017, @04:43AM
A VM used for that should always be snapshotted/checkpointed first so you can throw the changes they make away.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 29 2017, @05:31AM
And they are easy to firewall. It is fun to lock down the firewall to everywhere but the remote connection. Watching them flounder about as the machine claims it is connected to the Internet but none of the internet webpages work is amusing. The scammer usually shows you some stuff and then opens a browser to a payment portal, so stopping it there can be amusing because the person knows they are so close to a sale but cannot get there. I've had one try to connect to the internet for 30 minutes trying everything under the sun to connect. He finally hung up when he got too frustrated and I pushed it too far by replying to the internet not working with "well, then how are you connected to the machine? Aren't you supposed to be an expert?"