A new type of scam promising you to provide help with all kinds of technical problems is finding its way to social networks and Youtube. In order to get help, you need to call an US based phone number. It's likely the scammers are looking for non-tech savvy users to take over their computer and/or install malware. They create social media accounts and pages that give the impression users are dealing with American companies and people. Stock pictures of customer service representatives should add to that impression.
They use common English names like Peter Hamilton, John Williams, Angel Jolie, Linda Cruise and the companies often appear to be located in the United States, especially California appears to be the fake residence of choice for them.
Phone numbers found with many scams are 1-844-282-6955, 1-800-473-0932, 1-844-449-0455, 1-855-233-7309 and 1-855-531-3731 . Don't call them, we list them here so people searching for the numbers can find out about the scam.
When doing a search on Google the number is listed as, Hotmail Customer Service, Canon Printer Customer Service, Mac Mail Customer Service, Gmail Password Recovery, McAfee Customer service, Yahoo Customer Service and many more.
When we called the number, we were redirected to an Indian call center and got a friendly man with a clearly Indian accent on the phone who wanted to call us back. We weren't up to providing them with our phone number, so that's where that part of our investigation stopped.
The scammers post the number on sites like Facebook, Twitter LinkedIn, Slideshare and Youtube and then apparently have ways to quickly get a lot of likes, retweets and views.
The scammers have found a way to collect many technical support phrases which they then include in the videos, slides, tweets and other social media activity hoping search engines will index them so users can easily find them and call them.
Tricking users to call a fake customer service number seems to be hot. On a social media page of scammer 1, we found that scammer 2 was spamming his phone number and so did scammer 3, a competitive market to say at least.
