The Anatomy of Fraud and Deception in Tech Support Scams

 Last week, whilst researching a problem with an old printer, I happened to land on a website where the title of the web page matched the exacts symptoms I was searching on. I expected the page to describe the problem, the diagnosis, and the solution.

But as I was scanning the page in search of the expected solution, a chat window popped up with a live agent offering help.  And therein begins my misadventure in a tech support scam.

The short story is that a technician proposed a specious and bogus diagnosis that could easily have been ruled out, if the technician had candidly shared all of his evidence. But he withheld crucial information that would have enabled me to proceed on my own.

Once I realized I had been hustled, bamboozled, and scammed, I proceeded to document my experience and to provide the feedback on my experience to anyone who cared to hear the story.

In the process of searching for an appropriate forum to post my experience, I ended up on yet another page operated by the same unscrupulous company.  Thus began a rather remarkable series of dialogues in which multiple agents of this unscrupulous company compounded their errors, providing an increasing amount of incriminating evidence in a effort to defend themselves from the obvious conclusion.

I first outlined the story on this initial post on Facebook, accumulating additional material in the comments, including subsequently acquired evidence and chat logs that further revealed the incriminating and deceptive business practices of the unscrupulous tech support company.

It's remarkable how ineptly the agents of this company behaved as I laid out the evidence of misdiagnosis, misrepresentation, deceptive practices, and the ensuing scam.

Be sure to read the chat logs, included in the comments on the Facebook post.  They reveal a remarkable pattern of deceptive business practices.