His goal is to keep scammers on the phone for as long as possible, testing their patience while demonstrating the lengths to which these people will go to extract a few hundred bucks from their victims. In the most extreme cases, scam baiters use this to their advantage, hijacking the remote connection or provoking the scammer into running a file that allows them to hack and infect the scammer's computer and/or wider network. Few, if any, of these call center workers are genuinely computer literate, though. The caller can then see the "expert" fiddling with their computer, pretending to run diagnostics to make the whole pantomime look legitimate. Part of the fake support routine is to talk the caller through granting remote access to their machine. Every minute spent with a scam baiter is a minute that call center worker isn't spending with someone who might be talked into paying up. A common strategy is to simply call fraudulent support lines and waste as much of their time as possible before the person on the other end realizes they're the one being tricked. These real-life vigilantes make it their business to deceive the deceivers. Being generally tech-savvy doesn't mean you can't get got.īut just as there are scammers, so there are scam baiters. So much for growing up on the cusp of the internet age, it seems. But a Microsoft survey in 2016 found that millennials were actually the generation most likely to be duped. You may think the call centers, the vast majority of which operate from India, prey primarily on elderly and vulnerable people. Victims of these scams weren't taken for insignificant amounts, either, often paying between $200 and $400 to peace-of-mind peddlers. This April, the company said it had received 153,000 reports worldwide regarding support scams in 2017, up 24 percent from the previous year. Microsoft estimated in 2015 that in America alone, 3.3 million people would be defrauded that year, to the tune of $1.5 billion. It's impossible to know exactly how much money tech support scams bring in. They will fix the entirely fabricated problem with your computer, though, for a fee. There is no virus, of course, and the person on the other end of the line has no Microsoft affiliation. A pop-up will scare you into believing your computer has been hacked or infected, and provide a number for a Microsoft technical support center. (For the record, a legitimate American Airlines agent won't accept Google Play or Steam credit as payment.) Tech support scams are one of the easiest to stumble across. Another, relatively new confidence trick preys on the allure of cheaper airfare. You owe the IRS money for unpaid taxes, they say, and will face criminal charges if you don't pay immediately. Sometimes it's a cold caller claiming to be a government employee. And to think, 40 minutes earlier they were singing Sia's song "Cheap Thrills" to each other over the phone. A few words into the next sentence, the scammer hangs up. "I'm angry, but I'm trying really hard to just be honest and nice with you," he says. it breaks my heart." By "her," of course, he's talking about the elderly woman the call center workers think they've been passing around. And the lengths that you went through to try to take advantage of her are. "I'm probably your age," he admits to the woman currently on the call, "and I've known the whole time that this was a scam. I'm not actually a grandma," Kitboga says as he turns off his speech manipulator and begins talking in his normal, male voice. Nearly two hours and 20 minutes - and several transfers between call center staff - later, Kitboga drops the vulnerable-old-lady act. And may I know, is that a desktop or a laptop?" The PC has apparently been hacked, as confirmed by allowing the support team remote access, but resolving this comes at a cost. Don't worry, let me assist you with this. "I unplugged my computer right away," she continues, and after she explains her worries in a little more detail, a female voice on the other end of the line replies, "That's all right. "Well, my grandchildren were over and it's something about a pornography virus," says the soft voice of an elderly woman over the phone.
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