Scam Number: 800-998-6716
Scammer’s Website or Email: Various, see below
Additional information about this scam:
Interesting story of how I found this number seems to indicate that the scam gangs in India are running tech support and “flight reservations” scams at the same time. Searching for one of my favorite keywords: “Login” and “Account” on the domain sites.google.com, I came across this fake McAfee page: https://sites.google.com/view/mcafee-logins .
This links to https://quickbookhelpdesk.com/mcafee/ (LOL at the URL!) , which produces a fake error page with a toll free number that seems to be out of service.
So I decided to check out the root directory of https://quickbookhelpdesk.com/, which has nothing to do with Quickbooks, but is a phishing site for another antivirus product!
If you chat with the AI bot on the site, it will direct you to call 800-998-6716 for support. Which I did of course, I’m always in need of support! But the gentleman at the other end answered “Reservations, how can I help you?”
Now if you search Google for that number, you will see a whole bunch of spam websites claiming to be various major international airlines, all with the same toll-free number, how convenient.
82.180.133.90 is also the home for these fine, very legitimate-looking websites:
https://quickfixbookserror.com/ advertises 877-589-0302, but answers as “reservations”, the agent says “this is the reservations desk for all the major airlines.” How convenient!
https://www.darjeelingsawaari.com/might be a legitimate taxi service in India, but I would never trust it now that I know where the website is hosted. Perhaps the managers who are named in the website’s footer know something about what’s going on here.
A Google search for the company leads me to Zbest Payment Solutions, LLC, a credit card processing service by Alexson/Yuan Ye that claims to operate from a church in Queens, New York. They are listed as having jurisdiction in Delaware, but has possible ties to the People’s Republic of China.
I saw that, but it appears to be a personal residence. There’s no good reason to assume that whoever lives there has anything to do with this. Often it seems to me like these guys just throw a dart at a map to pick their U.S. addresses, or copy somebody else’s website without changing all the details.
So what? There are millions of people with Indian names all over the world. Are they all “perhaps innocent”? Should their home addresses be advertised to wannabe-vigilantes, just because a lying scammer claims that a “business” is headquartered there?
I called their Spanish language line 877-406-5092 and the agent (“reservations”) actually spoke the language competently, accent sounded like a Latin American or Caribbean native speaker – maybe Dominican? – anyway his favorite color is black.
I have called Spanish and Japanese Reservation/Call centers and if you listen closely in the background, 9 times out of 10 you hear Hindi. Rule of thumb for me is to call them Bhenchode right off the bat, and if they hang up then you got your answer.
