When a support scammer tries to get you to hand over your credit card details in exchange for a fraudulent virus removal and system protection ‘service’, an important part of the scam involves persuading you to give them remote access to your system. They do this partly to convince you that there is a problem with your system, and partly to ‘help you’ by installing the software you’re paying them for. The software is often legitimate, but it’s also usually stuff you could get for free elsewhere, and usually has very little to do with protecting you from imaginary viruses. According to reports from the UK, the scammers often use the logmein.com remote access service (I see reports of Team Viewer being used, too), but in the US, they make use – more often than not – of ammyy.com, a service apparently operating out of Seattle. In fact, the scam is often referred to in the US as the ammyy scam, though I haven’t seen much in the way of serious suggestions that Ammyy LLC is directly implicated in the fraudulent use of its service.
Read David's writeup here;
http://blog.eset.com/2012/08/24/ammyy-warning-against-tech-support-scams
Hat tip to Martijn Grooten (Virus Bulletin) for the heads up!
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