Hello, this is Michael from India . . . can I have your bank account details please?

stockhausen

stockhausen

stockhausen

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ActionFraud said:
On June 27th, 2017 four people were arrested as the result of two years of work from Microsoft and the City of London Police into the global problem of computer software service fraud.

In Woking, Surrey and Sussex Police Cyber Crime Unit arrested a 29-year-old man and a 31-year-old woman on suspicion of fraud. They have since been bailed. In South Shields, a 37-year-old man and 35-year-old woman were arrested on suspicion of fraud by NERSOU officers. Both were later released pending further enquiries.

The arrests have come about as a result of work by the City of London Police and forensic and investigative services provided by Microsoft analysing tens of thousands of Action Fraud reports and working with other affected organisations, such as BT and TalkTalk, to attempt to trace the source of the problem. This analysis and enquiries undertaken by the City of London Police have shown that many of the calls originate in India and that the worldwide losses from victims are thought to be in the hundreds of millions of pounds.
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I am absolutely delighted to hear that this is being taken seriously by Microsoft and the Police Cyber Crime squad but do wonder why people still fall for this scam? I get calls almost every day from people claiming to be from an ISP that I used to use before their customer database was hacked a while back.
 
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yeah i think its intended for the ones who have no idea about technology etc. its a shame as the ones who lose out are usually the poorest and suffer the most
 
Managed to keep the indian peep from microsoft on the phone for 50 odd mins, was a long boring day where I could game and phone at same time, guy got very angry and sweary at the end :E
 
Spoke yesterday evening to an Architect friend of mine who lives in Cambridge and works from home a lot;predictably, he is a keen cyclist. He keeps a compressed air horn on his desk and uses it to discourage the scammers - they don't seem to learn.

Because these people are calling from outside the UK, the Telephone Preference Service (TPS) has no effect. It is good to see that someone is doing something about nuisance calls such as this and even better that they have arrested people in the UK. I just wish that the Indian authorities would take some action over what is clearly a large scale, well organised criminal enterprise.
 
This reminded me of my brother who got a call from someone claiming to be from BT and trying to sell them something. My brother was a BT engineering manager and realised the guy was a fake so he started asking him what division he worked for, who his supervisor was so he could internally phone him. Waffle, waffle ... phone went dead.

On the Microsoft one, I played the real dumb computer user not understanding the keys or anything. "What's a keyboard?" I asked. Kept him on for ten minutes before he gave up.
 
I spent 10 mins walking around my hows opening "Windows".

In seriousness though my uncle very nearly got scammed. He didn't as I overheard the conversation. But they tried several times afterwards. He too polite to tell them to **** off.
 
They always hang up when you ask what their phone number is :p

I would like a way to just be able to block all calls from outside the UK though. Or gets auto rejected if theres no caller ID.
 
I wonder what sort of security these people have themselves? It would be relatively easy to create a honeypot VM (set up a bridged connection so it has its own IP on the network and make damn sure it is isolated from anything else on your network) for them to try and subvert. In the case of a friend who fell for this, they tried to remote login to the PC. For what purposes I don't know as she got suspicious and txted me part way through. However, you could perhaps trace them back to where they were, gather evidence and perhaps get some malware over to them somehow.

Just a thought. I wonder if anybody has ever tried.
 
What I've always wondered is what they need to commit fraud, and how they actually do it. I mean, they can't exactly take anything with just asort code and account number, can they? And even then, I would've thought it all to be fairly traceable. /shrug
 
h4rm0ny said:
I wonder what sort of security these people have themselves? It would be relatively easy to create a honeypot VM (set up a bridged connection so it has its own IP on the network and make damn sure it is isolated from anything else on your network) for them to try and subvert. In the case of a friend who fell for this, they tried to remote login to the PC. For what purposes I don't know as she got suspicious and txted me part way through. However, you could perhaps trace them back to where they were, gather evidence and perhaps get some malware over to them somehow.

Just a thought. I wonder if anybody has ever tried.
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There's a few vids on youtube where people have done this.

I don't get these now I've got a trucall phone, but telling them to go have have sex with themselves was generally pleasurable. Mostly couldn't be bothered wasting my time trolling them.
 
peterwalkley said:
There's a few vids on youtube where people have done this.

I don't get these now I've got a trucall phone, but telling them to go have have sex with themselves was generally pleasurable. Mostly couldn't be bothered wasting my time trolling them.
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I asked one if they thought their mother would be proud that her son was a thief.
 
Diddums said:
What I've always wondered is what they need to commit fraud, and how they actually do it. I mean, they can't exactly take anything with just asort code and account number, can they? And even then, I would've thought it all to be fairly traceable. /shrug
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They can install Keyloggers etc to get online banking and email passwords etc
 
I don't know how they did it, but the buggers got my main private email address, home address, and full name, then they sent me a .doc word file which no doubt contained a macro to install a load of malware. I just deleted it without opening, but it looked pretty professional. To this day I have no idea how they got my details, especially home address, I rarely put that online.
 
Brenn47 said:
I don't know how they did it, but the buggers got my main private email address, home address, and full name, then they sent me a .doc word file which no doubt contained a macro to install a load of malware. I just deleted it without opening, but it looked pretty professional. To this day I have no idea how they got my details, especially home address, I rarely put that online.
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Probably stolen from a company that got hacked. For example, if you were a TalkTalk customer. Have you tried https://haveibeenpwned.com/ ?

Can sometimes tell you where they got your data from.
 
I have a great phone (BT 8600) that means all calls are screened if it is a number that the phone doesn't recognise you do have to program numbers into the phone book, but that isn't an issue.

Usually, it is enough to deter cold callers and scammers. If not, there is a nice block button on the phone that just blocks their number and you put the phone down. Simples :D I have very few phone calls a day now on my house phone whereas I used to get 2 or 3 a day most days!
 
Thekwango said:
Surely because their target demographic isn't the net savvy like most on here but rather your gran/grandad, vulnerable people like that?
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i think it's just folk open to scamming in general, i know a few old folk who might not be tech savvy, but who can see through a scam a mile off.

it's good they're taking some action, although perhaps more awareness might be a better angle than spending so much resources on singling out individual scammers.
 
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