I once was offered a job from an advertisement that I answered for "Technical Support Staff" but soon found out what I had walked right into. . .
Whistleblowers have claimed that hundreds of people were hired in order to systematically commit a fraud with the citizens of the United States and the United Kingdom and other developing countries.
These call centers were spread across different intensities and at times, had up to 60 employees working in a single shift.
Getting reeled in...
The scale of the scam was such that the companies had proper recruitment drives (Which I answered an ad for) as well as training facilities in order to train their employees. Once the training started my gut wrenched.
The training started off like normal showing us various errors and software they use to "Clean virusus and such" but from my limited knowledge of how things worked things didn't add up. It did not take too long to confirm the worst...
The bait and switch...
One slide came up on the screen entitled "How to generate fear among the victims of a computer virus or of losing control over their gadgets. " - Under the garb of fixing their gadgets or removing this virus, these customers were charged hundreds of dollars at a time. While the truth was that all along, there was no virus to speak of. Neither, the call center employees had the proper powers to even scan the computers of their victims. The software they told us to use did not do anything and the computers we where working on where never connected to the "victom" at all.
This elaborate scam has been running around for quite some period of time then only recently, the whistleblowers have come up. I was one of them and now this company is shut down...
In some other cases friends have told me, the employees of these call centers install the virus on their own and thereafter detected this virus and thereafter can visit their victims to spend hundreds of dollars in order to get their computers and other gadgets cleaned.
Moreover, in some of the cases, the virus was even used against the victim in order to get the bank details so that money can be siphoned from the bank account details of the customers.
Follow the data...
The way in which these call centers even got the list of their victims is suspicious. It is assumed that the board from the corporate telecom companies in those countries itself had an immense amount of details about customers including the details of the salary as well as the other financial details of their victims. This, in turn, provided them with the leverage to extract as much amount of money as possible.
Scripts are provided in order to ward off the questions and the suspicions of most of the victims. The gadgets of the customers were then manipulated knowingly either to extract money in the form of cleaning their computers or to get their bank account details so that they can be hacked.
Recently, however,Other investigative agencies all over the world have been taking a look at the scam and have been shutting down such call centers in India as well as in other countries. It remains to be seen whether most of this operation is shut down or still there are quite a few call centers which are operating.
Shutting it down!
I managed to force the police in my area to take a look at the company and since then they have shut down and presumably moved out of town. Unfortunately because their was no local victims that layed any charges they got away free.
Whats you experience with call center scammers?
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That is pretty crazy, thanks for sharing.
Thank you for the comment walterjay.