A few months back I got a call one evening which was clearly a virus call centre scam; you know, the ones that call you out of the blue, tell you your PC is infected with all sorts of nasties and offer to fix it for you? Or maybe you don’t know, which of course is why these scams have been going on for quite some time and are still very active today.
Fortunately I did know about such things so rather than summarily dismissing them with a level of disdain I normally reserve only for telemarketers, I recorded the audio of the call right up until the point where they were ready to take control of my PC. I published the whole episode in my post titled
Anatomy of a virus call centre scam.
But I was left wondering; what exactly were they going to do to my PC once they got remote control? Try and squeeze some cash out of me for “fixing” things? Install their own variant of “antivirus”? Or just plain old enslave my PC into being part of a
botnet? So I decided to find out by letting them do whatever they wanted whilst recording the audio
and the screen so the entire experience could be shared.
