Newswise — Computer Science researchers from Stony Brook University in New York have concluded the largest study of technical support scams to date, spanning 8 months, and following are the top 9 findings:
1. The average call center employs 11 scammers for handling calls from victim users.
2. The vast majority of the call centers are in India.
3. Scammers are targeting mostly people from English-speaking countries.
4. The average technical support scam website makes $68K by unsuspecting users.
5. A scammer speaks with a victim for about 17 minutes before asking for (an average) of $290 for providing unnecessary services.
6. There are 8.6K domains belonging to technical support scams and 1.5K (mostly) toll-free phone numbers.
7. Scammers abuse cheap TLDs (top level domains) for their domain names and use words like "microsoft", "support" and "error" to increase the chances that users think they are trustworthy.
8. Most victims are middle-aged/older people who are not computer savvy, who believe the fake alerts that they see in their browsers and call the scammers directly.
9. More scams happen during the week than on the weekend.
About the ScienceDespite their conceptual simplicity, technical support scams are responsible for yearly losses of tens of millions of dollars from everyday users of the web. Findings from this study, accepted at NDSS 2017, provide a methodology that allows law enforcement to identify new technical support scams on a daily basis and gives them techniques that they can use to prioritize takedowns (e.g. taking down large operations before they take down small ones). It also proposes technical and educational countermeasures for helping users avoid being victimized by technical support scams. To read the full paper visit: https://securitee.org/files/tss_ndss2017.pdf
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