I'm very familiar with the "you have a virus" pop-ups that trick helpless users into downloading bogus software, but I've never heard of a cold call version of that scam.
Am I misunderstanding something, or do these scammers literally call people's phones and tell them out of the blue that their computer is infected? What if they say "I don't have a computer"? What if they say "I have three computers, which one?" Seems like that would raise more flags more quickly than a pop-up showing on your actual computer, and manual phone calls can't scale like pop-ups... how is that still profitable or what am I missing?
Edit: OK, number of computers is easy. Still surprised that it is profitable given (what I suspect as) the inability to scale. I guess the conversion rate just isn't that bad.
> Am I misunderstanding something, or do these scammers literally call people's phones and tell them out of the blue that their computer is infected?
Incredible as it sounds, that is literally what they do. My wife got called by these scammers last week but she knew enough to be suspicious and respond that her computer expert husband would look into it. :) (FWIW we live in Melbourne, Australia.)
This type of scam is one unfortunate side-effect of extremely cheap internet based telecommunications.
Exactly. Very low risk for them. If the call goes nowhere, they hang up and move on to the next target. The previous target thinks it a bit odd but what are they realistically going to do about it?
It works the same as those "We are from bank X, give us you accound details" scam emails. They completely miss people that don't use bank X but it looks much more legitimate for those that do.
Well, this actually happened to my Grandmother a few weeks ago (UK) who actually had them up to her bank login before my Grandfather stepped in. It quite disturbs me that scammers have better luck bluffing their way into someone's computer than hoping for a malicious script to catch a bite.
Am I misunderstanding something, or do these scammers literally call people's phones and tell them out of the blue that their computer is infected? What if they say "I don't have a computer"? What if they say "I have three computers, which one?" Seems like that would raise more flags more quickly than a pop-up showing on your actual computer, and manual phone calls can't scale like pop-ups... how is that still profitable or what am I missing?
Edit: OK, number of computers is easy. Still surprised that it is profitable given (what I suspect as) the inability to scale. I guess the conversion rate just isn't that bad.