librarianed:

prorevenge:

Story time: This happened last month.

I’ve gotten six phone calls in the last 24 hours from a number listed to an Apple store in CA. I pick up and get a prerecorded message stating my ‘icloud account’ is being hacked, and I should press 1 for tech support.

I’m skeptical, especially as I don’t own any Apple products, and I don’t have any icloud, itunes or ianything accounts.

Obviously a scam. The first time I hung up.

The second time I asked the ‘tech’ what they needed, and played a little dumb as they tired to direct me to a tech site that would let them take control of my computer. They hung up on me.

The third time they called I was at work, and went to the website they directed me to and kept repeating the website code incorrectly to them, repeating directions wrong, and just generally being confused. They dude is screaming at me to repeat exactly what he says, and finally tells me I’m not allowed to ask questions even when I try to clarify which account is hacked or what is going on. He tells me I’m too retarded to do this, and hangs up on me.

The fourth time I get a call from them I tell the guy its the fourth time he’s called, and ask if he’d proud of what he’s doing. I asked if his mother was ashamed of him stealing from people. He hung up.

The fifth time I go ahead and let him log into a computer system…I’ve set up a spare laptop with a virtual machine that I’ve loaded with every virus, toolbar, pop up ad, and other crap I can find. If it was a horse we would shoot it. It wasn’t logged into an admin account, so he trashed a few files and rage quit on me.

Sixth time: I let the ‘tech’ (a different guy each time, I can hear others in the background) log into my virtual machine and encrypt some crap. He demands $200.00 to unlock it. I cry, sob, beg, and finally open up my wallet and get my credit card. I misspeak and mix up my numbers enough that he gets pissed and taunts me. I finally suggest I take a picture and email the pic to him so he can read it.

I get an email he types on the screen, and I send from a throwaway account the file ‘credit.card.jpg.zip’

Apparently when he clicked on the file he got infected with some cryptovirus. The buddy who gave me the file told me it was a form of ‘Petya’, but I’ve never actually opened it to find out. Apparently he encrypted and locked his computer system. How did that happen?

My personal wondering is if his computer was on a networked environment or if they were isolated from each other. All I know is I didn’t get any more phone calls after that.

This is amazing. Related: Reply All did a couple episodes on a company that runs these scams a while back. It gets pretty wild.

https://gimletmedia.com/episode/long-distance/