Becoming a scammer for a day

so what do you need to do to become a tech support scammer and how much does it cost to get set up so I decided to become a tech support scammer for a day so I made a list of the things I'd need a fake virus pop up a suitable domain name a website to host the pop up on a USA free phone number a bit of advertising and some remote access software if anyone did really call I would explain to them that it was a scam and that it was just conducting an experiment I wanted to act the way normal scammers do what they typically do is register lots and lots of domains because they get shut down very quickly and they often have the word critical warning or virus detected or something of that nature equally I didn't want to spend a lot of money on this venture so I decided to pick the cheapest possible domain name I could get my hands on um for the princely sum of less than $1 namecheap.com give me the option of buying sister morning - virus detected club and it even included free who is guard not that I really needed this because I registered it with completely fake details anyway no checks were made whatsoever but rather than create my own pop-up from scratch I decided to use one that was used by scammers today so I picked one recent one and I downloaded it I'm just edited the hitch tml to put in my own phone number with a little bit of research on the internet I came up with global call forwarding com he offered a one travel yet number a US free phone number to forward to any number of my choice in the UK just like Namecheap there was no checking of my identity but I was required to give some billing details so that they would continue billing me after the trial had ended I did have to give them legitimate details for this part so once I had my u.s. free phone number it was time to start hosting my fake pop for the hosting I chose Amazon Web Services primarily because it was free and I'd seen other scammers use this in the past I just used Amazon's s3 service because this easily lets me copy all of the HTML into what they call buckets so I created two websites one for system warning - virus detected dirt club and the other with the www in front of it so I just loaded all of the files that I needed for the popups the last thing I needed to do was point the dns name to my new website and with one click my pop-up was ready this is what it looked like critical alert from Microsoft your computer has alerted us that it is infected by a virus and or spyware this virus may be sending so the only thing left to do is now to get some traffic I'll do this in exactly the same way the scammers do pay some advertisers for well over a year now I've been part of a Facebook group called scammer awareness this name isn't what it sounds like this is where tech support and other scammers go to to sell your and my data and they also advertise payment gateways for other scammers to use here for example is a scammer showing that he will give you UK and USA in bank holes and yet another one is looking for Microsoft best quality calls and other words tech support fraud calls all of this is being done quite openly he not only includes his name but his phone number and location in Delhi but the real purpose of the grip is to expose people who sell data to call centers and the data is worthless either that or they just take the money and run I've left a link to the Facebook group below just so that you can have a chuckle there's no hint of irony whenever the scammers get ripped off themselves so I certainly wasn't gonna use any of these groups to advertise my pop up no I would have to go to some legitimate sources I decided to use an advertising company called papads net for a couple of reasons number one they seem to be being used by scammers a number two they don't seem to be doing a lot of checks particularly from the adverts I've seen scammers use in the past I created a campaign called research into pop-up scams and I give the URL of my freshly created power now I'm not any kind of internet marketer and I have no idea how much it would legitimately cost to get my pop-up seen by thousands of people but I worked my through the campaign details and decided on a number of parameters firstly I had a u.s. phone number people in other countries are very unlikely to make international calls so I decided to pick the United States as my target country next I only wanted Windows users this pop-up only works for Windows users so there is no point in picking anyone else I was even able to exclude Windows Phone users I only wanted the desktop or laptop customers finally there was just me who was gonna be manning this support desk so I needed to make sure I was only going to get the calls during the hours that I was awake so with all those parameter set I hit the create button it told me to expect around 700,000 views per day but that was with unlimited budget I had really no idea how long 20 dollars would actually last what surprised me a bit was that my campaign went into pending approval status in other words somebody was going to check what my advertisement was about so to avoid any problems I initially pointed my new Demyan at a children's charity but to my surprise unto the credit of papads net when I checked a little later it was seen as not approved undetected correctly as a tech support scam I was a little bit suspicious of pop arts because I knew that scammers had used this in the past so I decided simply to change the name of the campaign and instead I called it charity care instead of research into pop-up scams nothing else changed I even continued to use the sium scammy domain name and that did the trick this time my campaign was approved I was ready to go I was able to look at my real-time traffic stats he was telling me that there were nearly 15,000 views of my pop-up ad in less than 30 minutes so with my budget doubled to $40 on 14700 net views of my pop up just how many phone calls did I get the answer was a big fat zero I got no phone calls whatsoever so why was this why had my marketing strategy completely failed well within six hours of that website going live it was classified as a deceptive or dangerous website and MOOCs browsers started to block the content I have to give Amazon a bit of credit for detecting this pop-up scam or alternatively it could have been someone who just reported this but getting the calls was never the point of this experiment it was all about seeing how quick and easy was to set up one of these scam websites and to find out exactly how much it would cost unless you can see my biggest cost was the $40 for marketing the DNS name was practically nothing of fifty seven cents for an entire year I had expected the free phone number it cost a fair bit but because of the trial period I was able to get this for free and likewise the web hosting was completely free so for a total of forty dollars and fifty seven cents I had myself a complete scam pop-up marketing campaign I'm pretty sure these low white lays may also apply to all pop-up scammers who they may have their advertising campaigns much better targeted than mine so given the lack of checking of any sort of identity it's no wonder that these scammer groups continue to very openly sell their pop-up campaigns on the likes of Skype and Facebook grips here you can see a Skype grip where they've no qualms and selling pop-ups which frees people's computers and it is targeted at England France and Germany and they also say that they can cloak the identity of the people running the scam their campaigns also cover things like google adwords and they offer support for norton mcafee office and many more computing applications they will often brag about the number of calls they receive and they will also forward some of these calls on to other call centers at a price the people in this Skype grip are quite happy to buy and sell these calls without acknowledging that at the end of the call there's a victim in fact they will brag by just how many calls they're receiving and for other call centers to get involved in the activity so although I was only able to get any calls myself I did prove just how easy and how cheap it is to get set up on one of these pop-up campaigns as usual if you like my videos please hit that subscribe button you can also contact me on Twitter out Jim browning 11 and I have a patreon account which is linked to below if you'd like to support me that way once again thanks for watching [Music] [Music]

Channel: Jim Browning

Views: 1,463,863

Rating: 4.9263897 out of 5

Keywords: scam, tech support scam, microsoft scam, popup scam, popup, scammer for a day, how to become a scammer, popads, how to be a scammer, cost of scamming

Id: Rawc3jDVlaw

Length: 10min 18sec (618 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 17 2018