Hi, I’m Matthew and I love scam-baiting. And over the next few week I would like to share my adventures into scam-baiting.
In June last year, My aunt was cold called by a 'lovely' man claiming to be from Apple Inc. The man started off by saying that the Apple servers had detected a virus on her Mac. He proceeded to use team viewer to connect to her Mac and ran through the usual script.
My aunt, oblivious to the scam, paid an unknown company £349.99 to have her computer cleaned. While 'cleaning' the computer data encryption malware was installed by the scammer. In turn, this meant that she had to pay lots of extra money (£199.99) to have her data decrypted.
My aunt, still oblivious, later told me about the man saying:"He was lovely and completely fixed my computer!" I then decided that if I couldn't undo past events I would stop it happening in the future. And that is how I got into scam-baiting.
Oh man. I haven’t personally had anyone I know get scammed, but I got into it from watching others doing it on YouTube. Did your aunt ever get her money back?
My mom fell victim to a support scam, a long time ago when this type of scam was relatively new and unheard of.
They never asked for any payment though, so I figure they loaded a bot or keylogger or something similar.
At the time, I had never heard of the scam, but the instant she started describing to me how she got an unexpected phone call from Microsoft telling her that her computer was causing problems on Microsoft's network, and how she installed their remote control program from the internet, I knew it was time to wipe the computer and rebuild.