WARNING: Telephony scams still ongoing

As if you needed telling, but sadly to state the obvious, the scammers traced back to India are still very much involved in defrauding insuspecting victims, and are now apparently going one step further by infecting their machines to boot.

In previous iterations of this scam the person on the phone would get you to click through to the event viewer to "find something red". Strangely enough there is usually something red in most people's event log log. However, do not despair if you don't have anything red, yellow is just as bad. Once the problem (well any problem) was identified your support would have expired and they redirect you to a web site where you can part with your money and download some version of malware.

The new iteration of the scam goes one step further. Rather than get the victim to look, they get you to install teamviewer (although no doubt other similar tools are likely used). They take control of your machine and start moving the files across. Manually infecting, sorry fixing, your machine. In this particular instance they noticed they were in a VM and promptly started removing the files they had moved, before the link was dropped and the phone call terminated.

The scam is obviously still working. It seems they have figured out that users can't be trusted to click a link, but installing remote control software and getting you to install the malware for them is ok.

Microsoft Support Scam (again)
http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=10912

References

Info: Telephone scammers still coming to a phone near you!
http://hphosts.blogspot.com/2011/03/info-telephone-scammers-still-coming-to.html

Support Scams: Even More Personal
http://blog.eset.com/2010/12/16/support-scams-even-more-personal

Fake Support: the War Drags On
http://blog.eset.com/2010/11/18/fake-support-the-war-drags-on

Marketing Misusing ESET’s Name
http://blog.eset.com/2010/06/23/marketing-misusing-esets-name

techonsupport.com, click4rescue.com, pcrescueworld.com: SupportOnClick revisited
http://hphosts.blogspot.com/2009/12/techonsupportcom-click4rescuecom.html

SupportOnClick: Phoned by Malwarebytes? BigPond? Anyone else?

http://hphosts.blogspot.com/2009/07/supportonclick-phoned-by-malwarebytes.html

SupportOnClick Update
http://hphosts.blogspot.com/2009/04/supportonclick-update.html

supportonclick.com scamming you by telephone!
http://hphosts.blogspot.com/2009/03/supportonclickcom-scamming-you-by.html

Fake tech support call scam - prefetch virus logmein123.com
http://www.digitaltoast.co.uk/fake-tech-support-call-scam-prefetch-virus-logmein123com

New scam - They call you by phone!
http://www.malwarebytes.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=11156

Staffordshire Council - Telephone computer support warning (PDF)
http://www.staffordshire.gov.uk/NR/rdonlyres/6997DBB0-E31E-4AFB-A886-C9DDEE114204/90090/TelephoneComputerSupportWarning.pdf

Cold call scam warns of virus infection
http://www.h-online.com/security/Cold-call-scam-warns-of-virus-infection--/news/112893

Scareware scammers adopt cold call tactics
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/10/supportonclick_scareware_scam