[Law enforcement authorities, working with Microsoft, have now traced many of these boiler rooms to New Delhi, India’s capital and a hub of the global call-center industry. On Tuesday and Wednesday, police from two Delhi suburbs raided 16 fake tech-support centers and arrested about three dozen people. Last month, the Delhi authorities arrested 24 people in similar raids on 10 call centers.]
By Vindu Goel and Suhasini Raj
A
fake pop-up notice warning that a virus has infected a computer.
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MUMBAI,
India — You know the
messages. They pop up on your computer screen with ominous warnings like, “Your
computer has been infected with a virus. Call our toll-free number immediately
for help.”
Often they look like alerts from Microsoft,
Apple or Symantec. Sometimes the warning comes in a phone call.
Most people ignore these entreaties, which
are invariably scams. But one in five recipients actually talks to the fake
tech-support centers, and 6 percent ultimately pay the operators to “fix” the
nonexistent problem, according to recent consumer surveys by Microsoft.
Law enforcement authorities, working with
Microsoft, have now traced many of these boiler rooms to New Delhi, India’s
capital and a hub of the global call-center industry. On Tuesday and Wednesday,
police from two Delhi suburbs raided 16 fake tech-support centers and arrested
about three dozen people. Last month, the Delhi authorities arrested 24 people
in similar raids on 10 call centers.
In Gautam Budh Nagar, one of the suburbs, 50
police officers swept into eight centers on Tuesday night. Ajay Pal Sharma, the
senior superintendent of police there, said the scammers had extracted money
from thousands of victims, most of whom were American or Canadian.
“The modus operandi was to send a pop-up on
people’s systems using a fake Microsoft logo,” Mr. Sharma said. After the
victims contacted the call center, the operator, pretending to be a Microsoft
employee, would tell them that their system had been hacked or attacked by a
virus. The victims would then be offered a package of services ranging from $99
to $1,000 to fix the problem, he said.
Such scams are widespread, said Courtney
Gregoire, an assistant general counsel in Microsoft’s digital crimes unit.
Microsoft, whose Windows software runs most
personal computers, gets 11,000 or so complaints about the scams every month,
she said, and its internet monitors spot about 150,000 pop-up ads for the
services every day. The company’s own tech-support forums, where people can
publicly post items, also see a steady stream of posts offering fake
tech-support services.
Although American authorities have busted
such scams in places like Florida and Ohio, the backbone of the illicit
industry is in India — in large part because of the country’s experience
running so many of the world’s call centers. India’s outsourcing industry,
which includes call centers, generates about $28 billion in annual revenue and
employs about 1.2 million people.
“The success of the legitimate industry has
made it easier for the illegitimate industry there,” Ms. Gregoire said. As in
any con, experience helps. “You have to convince them they have a problem,” she
said. “You have to have the touch.”
For tech companies, combating the
impersonators is complicated by the fact that many legitimate tech-support
operations, including some of Microsoft’s, operate from India.
The scam is quite lucrative. Researchers at
Stony Brook University, who published a detailed study of fake tech-support
services last year, estimated that a single pop-up campaign spread over 142 web
domains brought in nearly $10 million in just two months.
Najmeh Miramirkhani, lead author of the
research paper, said the network of entities involved in the scams was complex,
with some making their own calls and others running the sites but outsourcing
the calls to India. Many of the scammers also share data with one another.
“This is an organized crime,” she said.
Microsoft said it was working with other tech
industry leaders such as Apple and Google, as well as law enforcement, to fight
the scourge, which is migrating beyond the English-speaking world to target
other users in their local languages. In the 16 countries surveyed by
Microsoft, people in India and China were the most likely to pay the con
artists.
The problem extends beyond fake tech support,
too. In July, the Justice Department said 24 people in eight states had been
convicted for their roles in a scheme to use Indian call-center agents to
impersonate tax collectors at the Internal Revenue Service. The thieves duped
more than 15,000 people out of hundreds of millions of dollars. Thirty-two
contractors in India were also indicted.
Mr. Sharma said that in a similar con broken
up by his department, call-center agents had impersonated Canadian tax
authorities.
Like the I.R.S., Microsoft and other
legitimate technology companies do not call their users out of the blue. Nor do
they send security alerts to the screen telling customers to call them.
Ms. Miramirkhani had some simple advice to
avoid being conned: Don’t pick up the phone.
Vindu Goel reported from Mumbai, and Suhasini
Raj from New Delhi.
Follow Vindu Goel and Suhasini Raj on
Twitter: @vindugoel and @suhasiniraj.