Phone Fraud Jumps 113% as Criminals Focus on Call Centers
Criminals are targeting corporate call centers at an unprecedented rate, resulting in a 113 percent spike in the fraud rate in the last year, new data compiled by Pindrop shows. Phone fraud has become one of the favored tactics for criminals as they look for less-risky and more-profitable avenues to get into targeted organizations. The phone […]
Inside the Tech Support Scam Ecosystem
By Jonah Berg-Ganzarain A pair of doctoral students and their advisor, looking for insights into the inner workings of tech support scams, spent eight months collecting data on and studying the tactics and infrastructure of the scammers, using a purpose-built tool. What they uncovered is a complex, technically sophisticated ecosystem supported by malvertising and victimizing people around […]
FTC Halts Tech-Support Scam That Pretended to Represent the FTC
The FTC has shut down a phone and email scam that involved scammers contacting consumers, falsely claiming to be working on behalf of the FTC and offering fake tech support services. The scheme is a twist on the old Windows tech support scam in which fraudsters call consumers and try to sell remote tech support […]
Amazon Adds Pindrop for Security of Connect Call Center Service
The call center has become a key entry point into many organizations for fraudsters and cybercriminals, and enterprises have discovered that protecting that channel is not the same as defending a corporate network. The phone channel has its own unique traits and peculiarities that make it a challenge for security teams, particularly the involvement of humans […]
FCC Warns on New ‘Can You Hear Me’ Phone Scam
Phone scammers have adopted a new tactic recently that is part of a long-term scheme to impersonate victims during calls with banks or other financial institutions. The new technique involves a scammer calling a victim and when the victim answers, immediately asking, “Can you hear me?” The idea is to record the victim’s voice as […]
Those IRS Scam Calls May Disappear Soon
The FCC has moved one step closer to implementing a system that would prevent robocalls that spoof the caller ID of numbers that don’t initiate outbound calls, a move that could significantly reduce the volume of scam calls reaching businesses and consumers. The commission on Thursday issued a notice that seems public comment on the concept of […]
On the Wire Podcast: Roger Anderson
Last year, we talked to Roger Anderson about his Jolly Roger Telephone company bot, a system he designed to frustrate and annoy telemarketers by sending them through an infinite loop of robot responses. Now, Anderson is taking aim at the Windows support scammers who try to scare victims into calling them and paying for fake […]
Phone Bot to Target Windows Support Scammers
The man who developed a bot that frustrates and annoys robocallers is planning to take on the infamous Windows support scam callers head-on. Roger Anderson last year debuted his Jolly Roger bot, a system that intercepts robocalls and puts the caller into a never-ending loop of pre-recorded phrases designed to waste their time. Anderson built the […]
FTC Cracks Down on Two Huge Robocall Groups
Continuing its campaign against phone fraud operations, the FTC has dismantled two major robocall organizations that the commission alleges were making hundreds of millions of calls over the course of several years to consumers who were on the Do Not Call registry. The FTC filed complaints against two separate groups of defendants, the leaders of which […]