(More) Confessions of a Support Scammer

Are you sick of those techie phone scams like me? Please read.
 
By David Harley posted 3 Jun 2015
 
Marek Lelovi?, my colleague at ESET, drew my attention to a fascinating Reddit thread. It was initiated by someone who stated that:
“I worked at a phone scam for 6 months. I had just recently quit because I hated the job. So literally ask me anything.”
 
It’s not the first ‘confessional’ I’ve seen (apparently) by a former support scammer, or even the most informative in terms of techniques – compare this blog, apparently from someone who worked for an Indian call centre – but it is nevertheless pretty interesting, because it comes from someone in the US.
 
I wouldn’t expect to get calls from call centres focused on the US since I’m not in the US myself, but I rarely see reports anywhere of calls where the scammer isn’t in India. Mind you, the scammer will often claim to be somewhere local – I had a great deal of fun with one scammer who claimed to be calling from London, a city he evidently didn’t know at all, whereas I happen to know it very well, having lived there for most of my working life.
 
I was aware there are tech support operations around in the US that are advertising themselves on the net, and this isn’t the first report I’ve seen of a scammer who seems to be based in the US (as in one of the incidents described here). As with the report from Lenny Zeltser I cited there, the (ex-)scammer claims to have been dealing with inbound calls rather than cold-calling. However, the company he worked for appears to have gone much further than merely advertising via social media and web sites.
 
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