by Nate Anderson

Courtesy of Aurich Lawson

When the call came yesterday morning, I assumed at first I was being trolled — it was just too perfect to be true. My phone showed only "Private Caller" and, when I answered out of curiosity, I was connected to "John," a young man with a clear Indian accent who said he was calling from "Windows Technical Support." My computer, he told me, had alerted him that it was infested with viruses. He wanted to show me the problem — then charge me to fix it.

This scam itself is a few years old now, but I had not personally received one of the calls until yesterday — the very day that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced a major crackdown on such "boiler room" call center operations. The very day that six civil lawsuits were filed against the top practitioners. The very day on which I had just finished speaking with Ars IT reporter Jon Brodkin, who spent the morning on an FTC conference call about this exact issue. And here were the scammers on the other end of the line, in what could only be a cosmic coincidence.

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Source: Ars Technica