SCARE-WARE!! ReImage scam (Part 1)

there is a scam I'm seeing more and more of on the Internet and its name is scare where this is software designed to look like legitimate program but its real purpose is to get you to buy software or services you don't need and the companies who make this software have no hesitation in creating fake adverts designed to look like real virus scans but in fact is an attempt to get you to buy their thick software a prime example of this is reimage or image + com this software is meant to optimize your PC by scanning it and coming up with recommendations for making a cleaner or run faster the problem with this software is it will always produce results which will make it look as if you've got a problem and all for money but this software is particularly bad because it encourages people to call a helpdesk number it's always publicized when you first run it during the installation and even after you've uninstalled it however if you call one of these numbers you're gonna be stung for a lot more money critical alert for my gosh malwarebytes describes reimage as potentially unwanted program because it fits all the criteria of scare where and because it includes some registry analysis and cleaning features it is also described as digital snake-oil so why this digital snake-oil term well it's simply because registry cleaners are the digital equivalent of snake oil they don't do anything even microsoft advise people not to use registry cleaners because they have the potential to do more damage than actually you will gain in the cleaning process but even reputable software like ccleaner seen here on the screen will also include a registry cleaner however if you measure the performance before and after this registry cleaning you will never see any perceivable difference so how does reimage market itself well it seems to have multiple partners or affiliates and each of these resellers seem to be free to create their own adverts because the internet is completely unregulated on the contents of these adverbs and you end up seeing pages like this here I mistyped a URL I added an extra you into YouTube and up pops a very dodgy advert this one tells me that my Windows computer is at high risk and my system files will be deleted after a few seconds if I click opt it I end up on reimage plus com the lack of any sort of regulation on these fake and misleading adverts has meant that these software companies can peddle their software under completely false pretenses as an experiment I created a brand new virtual machine which had never connected to the Internet am i installed reimage plus just to see what that software would make if a brand-new clean virtual machine I let it run to see what would happen when I run the program it does its usual stuff it starts off by analysing the hardware that it's running on and most of this is ok except that the CPU temperature seems to always be 60 degrees it can tell the real temperature so it just makes something up and at the end of the scan as predicted it did define something that I needed to repair and of course when I do click start repair up will pop a price list you're not getting this for free so exactly what was it that reimage repair was finding on this brand new totally clean and never connected to the Internet PC the reimage analysis uncovered two types of problems the first were temporary folders things which should be there normally and the second were described as shared dll's I checked these on the internet and there's no good reason why any of these should be flagged as potential problems this software was just looking for an excuse to charge a customer something but a software license cost would be the least of your worries because if you actually phoned one of these helpdesk numbers more than likely you'd end up paying a lot more work to fix your computer this is what happened when I phoned the UK helpdesk number 4 on the ask the agent what all these errors actually wear thank you for calling reimaged support please wait for the next available agent hi thank you for calling my name is father how can I help you kidding hi yeah I think I've got a problem with my computer it was it was talking about a virus first I downloaded reimage that seems to fit at night some things and I'm not sure what it means well I saw a message about a virus I was prompted to download reimagine it did a scan detected some stability issues something you can help the agent did indeed say that he could help me with this problem by downloading some remote access software called LogMeIn and with that he was able to access my computer and run some further Diagnostics unusually the each now give me his real first okay his name is Sagar now Brandon we are connected just don't do anything I would like to inform you during the course of cover shooting you will be the primary controller I will be just a second yourself once the work is done and your issues result you need to click on this red X button to end the session with me all right okay yeah yeah I would inform you this session is being recorded for training and quality purpose all right yeah that's okay okay so I can see that if I found some security challenges and instability issues in fact the software finally no security issues only registry instability problems which was secured or not and you not any means website which was take cure or not any means the site which was secure or not and you're not on hand I was just worried that there's a virus or something the technician quickly closed that webpage which implied that it was a norton antivirus scan in fact it was a bit of never leaked instructed the script meant to look like Norton AntiVirus and any competent technician we'd have spotted this immediately next psycho tried to imply that I was accessing insecure websites he used the s and hit T TPS to illustrate this in fact whenever you send traffic to a website the s only encrypts the traffic between your browser on that website it doesn't mean that the website itself is any more or less secure than any other superantispyware if anything is happening on your computer which is trying to steal your information or riders like something like that this software will give us all the information about that all right okay okay next the technician downloaded another piece of scareware called superantispyware this piece of software is pretty much guaranteed to throw up a lot of errors and unless you know and can interpret what these errors actually mean it could reinforce a message that ass camera was trying to make I would go ahead and check that audio updates getting installed or not okay and I would take that do you have any antivirus well okay can you please click on update security yeah yeah well I see it this plainly shows that my operating system is completely up to date and recently well I would like to tell you I would like to inform you I feel that your update are getting created once again he's trying to scare me here occasionally some of the windows updates will feel but there's usually a good reason and it will retry I say cumulative open it yeah yeah you are getting killed okay let me tell you Brandon what happened needed apparently bought in for our Kavita he's right that Windows updates are very important but he should look carefully of what the ape is actually showing in this update are not getting installed the challenges increases on our computer on our machine if he wasn't being honest he would have pointed out that all of the necessary updates had succeeded and any failures were dined to the fact that it was a reinstallation of an already installed update oh did you pay attention to them I never noticed I as the scammer should be aware these installations happen silently in the background without alerting any user all right you had something in your computer I would talk about that he then gets me to run the standard error reporting facility which is built into all Windows 10 computers I see that your Microsoft malware protection 134 to a cent it was it stopped it stopped working and several times it is out working so again he lies to me none of these programs have actually stopped or filled they're doing what they're supposed to do and sending reports to Microsoft I'm going to take that do you use any kind of antivirus program on the machine or not right right Windows Defender will not appear in the installed software list I see that you do not use any antivirus program on the machine this is all the program which you have about the computer right and there is only one program that is cleaner pc cleaner and that only cleans the junk files from your machine ok however the antivirus program so once again he's lied I do of course of antivirus it's completely up to date that is protecting this computer so beautiful well it's kind of shopping and browsing and email and the usual stuff really humanized oh yeah ok I see over here that these are your assistant David and you must be knowing drivers drivers are very 14 parts pure Cabrera they are in small programs of your kuvira what they do that they help you to answer any other program on the machine and they help you to ask any other application on the computer these all are your important drivers over here I see that they have been manually topped this script out of the scammers handbook these drivers should be stopped on a normal PC because they're only started manually okay it means that the engine which you have they haven't started making changes on your machine really right god he claims that it's an infection which has stopped these drivers which is a complete and utter lie I think you Netanya a main part of the computer know I talked about you have 510 with no hint of irony superantispyware recognizes reimage as potentially unwanted program but the scammer quickly hides this the computer unintentionally on your computer we should be grateful for computer performance apart from that you have tracking object is he tracking object yeah yeah tracking objects okay you know what I have what I'm highlighting for you here the scammer skillfully overrides the words while not harmful and gets me to raid out the remainder of the sentence exactly these are your online activity which do you do and these items are activity means whatever you do online whatever you whenever you are connected to online and whatever you do is all are there I would like to tell you in the past you have with any website which was full of advertisement you click on any of the advertisement which rotate you to a different website and that is why you got the virus and you got the adware simply clicking links on a webpage will not give you a virus you have to actively download something or have an unpatched PC appv what is highlighting here are just advertising cookies temporary bits of information which can indeed track users but are not in themselves harmful these all are the website which was full of hydro determined and these all are there in your computer which are talking of information and there you are having full of them right right do I even legitimate websites will have odd tracking cookies in them these are no indication of any malware or infection I'm gonna go check that everything is safe and secure or not means like your all information all right ok ok I see that all your information are opened right now he claims that my credentials are right in the open but this is very far from the truth in fact what he's looking at or any stored credentials for making new connections uh-huh it means that all the very same computer where you have the adware I would like to tell you adware everything that he's saying is taken from a script in order advertisement which target online he's just told me that any online activity will result in adware this is patently untrue cookies will certainly be dropped but definitely not hardware known Google and I would like to type adware now you can do it over here the adware definition right over here can you please read it yeah and where is a form of malware that hides on your device and Sergey advertisements some-odd we're also monitors your behavior online so it can target you by reading out these definitions all he's trying to do is reinforce the message of all of the lies that he's told so far and in our on your device on your network also even though if you are using your mobile phone and your computer okay or your network anything or or even on your network things are not safe and secure this is the old scammer classic of a network virus he's claiming that if you have a problem on one device some hide effects everything else on the same network I would like to tell you everything is open right now and adware is intended to target you and it helps you sorry it it is there to track your information and it does not help you any which way being in your computer it has only purpose that it means keeps stealing your information like a password of your account your email your credit card information your debit card information or any kind of a financial information which you use all your special media account their information your pictures photograph the official security number or anything like that alright a lot I can count this as another lie because all he's done is just repeat all of the things he's just said before he's just trying to scare me so in the space of less than 15 minutes he's managed to tell me 13 lies he must be building up to try and sell me something and true to form he lists out everything that he says that he needs to do in my computer to make all these fixes but of course the fixes will come at a cost and he lists out exactly how much it's going to cost me he would like nobody would be able to infiltrate okay oh right okay which one do you think I should go for then because I'm not great with computers and I need a bit of advice to be I would yeah I would always take a menu that you should always go for the premium here hmmm okay 499 und and surprise surprise our technician recommends the most expensive option not really a surprise so once I gave him some fake information the technician then fires up his payment page it seems to be from a company called soft will Infotech in India you need to fill the form okay okay in part two of this video I'll expose exactly who's soft will Infotech really are where they're based how they run their operation and how much money they make on these scams and the figures are truly shocking as always you can sponsor me on patreon and the link is in the description or catch me on Twitter again thanks for watching

Channel: Jim Browning

Views: 731,566

Rating: 4.9547896 out of 5

Keywords: scareware, scam, reimage, reimage scam, scammer, microsoft scam, scamware, optimizer

Id: WXcAshytyPY

Length: 19min 0sec (1140 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 17 2019