2012-12-11 18:53:11 | How to waste a scammers time
		The phone rings. The first alarm bell was the display which read 'withheld'. I answered it to be greeted with the second alarm bell, the phone ringing, clearly an automated call, which was answered by a kind indian gentleman a few moments later. Over the next few minutes we established that he was giving me a curtesy call regarding the serious infections on my computer and would like to help. Now, normally i just hang up when cold called (ive given up even being curtious), but, i wondered how long i could drag this out for. Playing the part of the gullible computer user i followed his instructions. First, could i press win+r. I was stuck at the first hurdle, the run dialog didnt appear, could this this a limitation of KDE?? Wanting to see what he wanted me to do i fired up virtual box, only to be greeted with the fact i had to recompile the vbox modules! A quick 'sudo /etc/init/d/vboxdrv setup' and some delay tactics and i was ready to resume my Windows XP machine. I hit Win+R and as intructed, typed e-v-e-n-t-v-w-r very slowly, why he couldnt just tell me to open Event Viewer i dont know! I asked me to confirm if there were any red exclamation marks, to my horror there was, apparently the 'Microsoft Searc Service' was having issues, but his explanation for this was that my computer was infected with many types of the worst malware and that theoves were stealing my details. Im sure if i was someone else i would be concerned, which reinforced my view that i should waste his time. Next i was asked to hit Win+R again, and type w-w-w-.-f-a-s-t-s-u-p-p-o-r-t-.-c-o-m. At this point i switched back to Chrome on Linux, not wanting to compromise my mostly unused VM, and went to said website. The site asks for a Customer Name and Support Key. I typed something appropriately witty as a name, and he read me out the key. I clicked 'start support session' and was prompetd with an error message from citrix stating that my OS/Browser was unsupported. He was confused. It should work in Chrome, but alas he failed to as which OS i was in, and assumed it to be a browser problem. So instead we tried showmypc.com. This site loaded upa java applet. Chrome prompeted me that Iced Tea was out of date and should i allow it. i dont think he knew what Iced Tea was, but reccomended i allowed it, which i did. He was surprised that it didnt download an executable, but i went into great detail about what i saw on the screen. He eventually gave up on that site and deciced i needed to speak to someone higher up as my computer was definitely in trouble! At this point i was about 30 minuted into the call. I tweeted, and got a few RT's and replies. There weer several iterations of trying fastsupport.com and showmypc.com, all with the same consfusing outcome, so next up was to try www.ammyy.com. he asked me to download and run the free program which i did, although i couldnt follow his instructions precisely, as i had to drop to a terminal and load it in wine! Now, this was getting a bit more risky, running random execuables, even within wine probably isnt a great idea, but i was willing to risk it. Unfortunately (or fortunatley) it crashed. I relayed the information from the crash window slowly over the phone. This could mean my computer is even worse than previously thought! We again tried some of the original websites, but then tried teamviewer.com. Unfortunatley for him, the teamviewer site know i was in linux and displayed a different page to what he was expecting. he asked me to click the download button, which took me to the Linux page. I read what i saw, and he prompted me to click on the Windows section, and download the free program. Again, i ran this in wine, and this one didnt crash. Slighly concerned and ready to disconnect if needed, i read out the numbers and pass code from the window that would allow them to connect and fix my computer. Fortunately, although the program loaded in wine, it didnt seem to have all the functionality and they were unable to connect. This reinforced their view that my computer was horribly compromised as they were unable to connect. He asked me to reboot my PC, then hung up. This was at ~57 minutes. I was a little shocked by this abrupt ending, but got back to coding, only to be called again 2 minutes later. The helpful technician asked if i had rebooted (i lied and said i had) and then asked what kind of connection i had. I replied 'wireless' and he asked me to reconnect (i lied again). He then asked me to visit the original fastsupport.com again. Again it errored with my unsupported OS. His final words, which were spoken by what sounded like a broken man were along the lines of 'right ok then' and he hung up. And that is how to spend an hour wasting a scammers time.

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