UPDATE: This post is getting some traction on reddit (thanks reddit!), so I wanted to address a couple things. First, I love telecommunications and I vow to never use this technology for mischief or malice. I built these bots to handle INBOUND telemarketer scammers, but about 10 days ago I got a popup saying my computer was infected. I called it and confirmed it was “Microsoft Technical Department”. I called it a few more times from different caller-ids and got the same call center. So I pounded it into the ground. After about 300 calls, the number was disconnected. Here are the types of messages.
Hi all,
I’m getting ready for a major initiative to shut down Windows Support. It’s like wack-a-mole, but I’m getting close to going nuclear on them. As fast as you can report fake “you have a virus call this number now” messages to me, I will be able to hit them with thousands of calls from bots. It’s like when the pirate ship turns “broadside” on an enemy in order to attack with all cannons simultaneously. I’ll calling it a “Broadside” campaign against Windows Support and the fake IRS.
There are A LOT of moving pieces to getting this working. One of them is letting you hear the calls as they happen. This is a little post to test the html for the posted recordings. I really need to write a WordPress plugin to do it. For now, I have a script that generates this raw HTML for me to post here. Anyway, please enjoy these experimental calls and we can anticipate the day when these call centers are all gone because of one pirate attacking them safely from off-shore.
Calls for category ‘Windows Support’
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| This is part of a small “Broadsides” campaign against a Windows Support number |
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| This audio is 441 seconds |
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I’m so freaking tired of this bushlachin (BS) AND WOULD APPRECIATE IF MICROSOFT took the time to kill them out.
They cant the scammers have ways to make themselves harder to track down and although alot of them got caught and arrested more keep coming up also only indian police can actually do anything against them (im saying this because most of the sammers are based in india)
The scam numbers show up on Bing and MSDN forums, and Microsoft happily show them in bing search results, strange enough Google filter out the scams from their search results
I just got a call from +20 87 6625299 Release the Kraken,
I was expecting an overseas call due to an upcoming wedding, which is why I answered.
It might be more effective over time to put in some content related to MS technical support type issues. Crazy people is great. But maybe give them some problems. And let them talk about how they are getting their credit cards.
I totally agree. I need more bots! You can “be a bot” if you’re interested. There’s an item for it in my store.
Oh lol this is awesome
What do you mean you can be a bot?
I am interested.
There’s an item in my shop at jollyrogertelephone.com called “be a bot”. It’s actually a lot of work, so it’s $180.
I agree. Once each “technician” has heard these calls a couple times they’ll just start hanging up on them immediately and the time wastage per call will go down to a few seconds. Has to be a way to actually engage them on tech support a little.
Just need some AI on the backend of the bot army…
let Eliza answer their calls…
there are so many telemarketing scammers and not enough of these!!!
Yes! Ai when a telemarketer says certain key words the bot can react. Hubby can help with the ai
Kinda reminds me of the ‘Lenny’ calls https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3CsEuJNSnh8
Someone was manually selecting the responses in these.
But automating it is really some next level stuff.
This was fully autonomous. All my bots are.
Lenny is fully automated as well, no manual responses. I use it all the time to transfer calls to. It actually waits for silence from the other party before continuing its scripted set of responses.
And I forgot to say, this is awesome. I wonder if you can do any phone number guessing given one known number, trying adjacent numbers to hunt for other lines they are using.
Good, thanks
The only thing I can think of that they might be able to do to combat this is configure their lines for “outbound only” ignoring incoming ISDN/E1/whatever requests. But still, at that point if you had enough line capability you could overwhelm the switch where they connect to the CO.
These particular scammers rely on inbound, they don’t even do outbound. You might be thinking of other telemarketers and scammers that cold call. These guys get their victims to call them.
You are right about the way they could combat what amounts to a telephony version of a DDOS attack, but the scammers are counting on victims to call in so indiscriminate blocking would hurt their “business model.”
Man, these things are hilarious! Please continue this campaign and keep posting them.
This is cool. Just, please, make sure that none of the numbers you call are “innocent numbers”. I can see someone submitting a school or a friends phone number as the phone of a scammer, and that poor institution or person having to deal with these calls
I 100% agree Rob. I will be extremely careful and I’m keeping the tech pretty quiet. I’m probably an idiot for announcing all this.
Some machine learning would go a long way here.
Not even machine learning. Just a very very basic AI would be insane. I am pretty sure I could hold a tech person for 30 minutes on the phone with some AI.
Hey Roger I write for Fairfax media and would love to write about this – what is the best way to get hold of you?
How did I miss this??? I’m so sorry Pat! Roger@jollyrogertelephone.com.
Lewis tech on YouTube. maybe you know already. but he is king on scammers.
These might last longer if you had a script in there to talk about their computer having virus problems.
One that I used on incoming calls was to say that my computer was *really* slow due to viruses and have them wait while the computer started so we could troubleshoot it. I just put them on hold after that, though and waited for the drop.
I’m working on a dedicated bot for this, but I need new voices! If you’re willing, I have a “be a bot” item in my store. It’s $180 because it takes a couple hours to do it right. If you’re game, please consider it.
Why am I paying you money for you to record and use my voice?
Yeah… That makes zero sense.
Dear god this post was a scam the whole time! 😀
Because he’s going to spend hours of his time editing your recording, tagging all the responses and building the script.
I play google translate voice saying things in HIndi like “your mother would be ashamed you are making money by lying.”
LOL! This is great, I guess DDoSing their phone lines is certainly an option. Keep up the good work, do you hang out on IRC at all?
This is a great idea. I’d like to see an app that can answer calls on a mobile and run a pre recording similar to the Lenny calls. I get lots of cold calls and can recognise the numbers now so an app I could click to answer the call would be excellent. Any developers out there fancy a shot at it?
Unfortunately the apps do not have access to an active call – there’s no way for an app to ‘take over’ the conversation. I have a couple options for mobiles though. You can conference in a bot, you can “summon a pirate” via text message, and if you have Google Voice, you can simultaneously ring me and I’ll answer the spammy calls. When we finally get a good solution for mobiles, it’s going to be awesome!
What I think they are saying is that once you receive a call that you know is spam, you go to the app and tag it so the app will answer any calls from that number. It is on the person using the app to be truthful about the number being unsolicited, but this will not be on you as it is when I report a potential number. Make sure the app shows the number list so one can unblock it. I have an app that I can tag inbound numbers and it does not allow the number to ring through. The app could also send in a recording or just the number so your system can analyze it, (like you would get many reports of the number from others who have tagged it), for a potential attack from your off shore attack system…Just a thought.
020 3868 7847 please take down these scammers
Sadly, if you listen to one the call, you can hear in the background one of the indian tech scamming a victim on the phone.
The bot sounds great so far… but needs to be adapted to deal with these “support” vermin.
As someone who does legitimate tech support, the worst thing you can tell me is that “something” is “just not working”, and that there’s this “thing” on the screen that’s “acting weird”. By being hopelessly vague about what the problem is will cause me to waste plenty of time trying to determine what exactly the problem is. Then to throw a spanner in the works, they will say something else has come up on the screen that’s changed everything, or that suddenly the internet has cut out, now has come back up again 3 minutes later. When I try and help them do something, they will say that they can’t find the button to press and that will always waste more time.
The annoying kid in the background is a stroke of genius.
Can’t wait to hear what a finely tuned bot is going to do to these guys.
….And one other thing that drives me up the wall is the client who thinks they knows what the problem is when they have no idea. So if you can get the bot to say something like “I REALLY think I know why the computer isn’t responding, and it’s because my printer has run out of ink and it’s DEFINITELY affecting my email… “, or something else completely inane and unrelated.
Reddit has a pile of tech horror stories to draw from for more ideas: https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/
Too true, you need to have the bot use tech terms incorrectly and be slightly off on the names.
Sounds like a lot simpler than trying to set up a “honey pot” system. (My only Windows system is run under a system emulator on my Mac, and then only here and there and has no e-mail or other personal stuff on it).
There was (and should be?) a tool somewhere (online) that maps toll-free numbers (800, 877, et al.)
to “real” numbers, but I can’t seem to find it offhand. But, in any case, an inundation of calls to the posted number should be a wake-up call to the LEC (Local Exchange Carrier) trying to complete the call(s) to the “real” number, and that in itself might entice the FBI and/or the FCC to get off their duffs and start proactively doing something specific and concrete about these assholes. Usually, when these turkeys call on a voice line claiming to be “Vindows Sooport”, I either yell “*BANG*” at them at the top of my lungs, blow a referee’s whistle, or ask, “You poor Wog – hasn’t Modi given you a *real* job yet?”
If you’re not in the USA, and are suffering from the same problem, well, you have my sympathy…
awesome work, if you need Spanish voices, let me know, I’ll happily donate my time, my email is [roger redacted]. I’d like to contribute!
Thanks Felipe! I might take you up on that. I’ll also need help determining which calls are funny.
I’m a tech lead for a legit tech support company. We deal with these scammer’s hijacks dozens of times a day. Most of our customers are elderly and/or not very computer proficient and it is heartbreaking and infuriating to see the effect these scams have on our customers.
I applaud what you are doing. You are my hero!
Oh thank you John! I’d love to hear more about what you do. If you see this, can you email me at roger@jollyrogertelephone.com?
I think you are a hero. As the ‘family tech’ I have been warning all my friends and family for years about these people. Microsoft does not call. Everyone calling you is a fraud trying to trick you into something. It is not as bad here in the Netherlands as in the USA, but still I got worried calls from friends and my father-in-law after they had been contacted or got this annoying popups. This is taking the war from the defense to the offence, and on their home turf. Awesome work man.
I receive calls quite frequently for both the windows and IRS scams. I created a contact on my phone for each type and each time they call from a new number I add the number to the appropriate contact. Then I setup call forwarding so that if the windows scammers contact calls it forwards the call to the IRS contact and vice versa. I imagine the calls don’t last long so it would be interesting to combine this with a bot that can get one of them to hold while it calls the other one and at least gets through the automated system so they don’t just hang up right away.
This is a fantastic Touring test: for how long the bots can fool the telemarketing people?
*Turing test
kudos to you. You are the kind of people which make IT great!
I am also hoping someone would be able to crack the parasites ( my real language to describe them would be unprintable) that prey upon elderly people in Canada and USA and drain them off their savings.
omg… such a chuckle… you are the best Roger!!! thank you for this 🙂
The “I want to ride you like a horse and f-ck you” from the operator in the 441 second clip starting around 5:46 was pretty hilarious. Then he starts worrying about the callers mental health 🙂
My mom’s computer just got a Zeus virus and had it popup all that crap about call Microsoft to fix it.. Anyways,here’s the number that was advertised in the pop-ups, I hope you or someone can have fun with it. 1-855-335-8826
Just plain thank you for this. Blockers and filters are great, but a talking predictive not is prure gold.
We need the old school Eliza to transcribe just a few of the scammers words and spit them back as questions, maybe even have it ask if it has been dreaming, in homage.
I would actually payou for this service to deal with inbound robocalls that connect to a human. This would be a great idea.
Wish granted! My bots are designed to deal with inbound telemarketing. Only $6/year gets you all of the residential bots.
I think you should charge more. Peace of mind is worth 5/month at least. Ppl will pay if it works. And you should be setup as a charity because you are helping ppl.
Awesome! Here’s a new one for you! 844-809-6674
Not sure if you’ve thought of this, but a way you can verify if phone numbers are legitimate is as follows:
Automate some queries to sites like okcaller where you check if other people complained about the phone number as a scammer.
If someone calls me from a number I don’t recognize, I try to google it to see if other people complain about it also. Hopefully, that will help you check if a phone number submitted to you is truly a scammer.
Some other ideas to make them waste more time:
“Hi, I seeing this error message on my windows. [pause pause], It says, ‘A fatal exception 0E has occurred at 0028:C000327021… (inaudbile).’ Hold on, let me find my glasses, [pause pause.] Oh ok it is 0028:C000Lii.. [read it really quickly….. ], Oh wait, let me read that to you slowly. [Repeat slowly] I don’t know if that is an L or a one. ”
Any way, I think you are doing a great thing!
A lot of the time when I help people with their computers, they have a slow old machine that takes forever to do anything. So I might be waiting at least 30 minutes for something to finish upgrading, or waiting on a virus scan that takes about as long. The hard drive is working double time and on an old machine, and it becomes really unresponsive to any input.
I had one Windows 10 update take at least an hour once. This would be so easy to exploit over the phone. Get the robot to say that “I tried restarting my computer and now something is installing, it’s telling me not to turn my PC off… so I just better wait”
10 minutes later “It’s saying that it’s only 14% complete!”
15 minutes later “It’s only 35% complete!”
You get the idea.
I’d like to hear some of the telemarketer conversations. Are there any recordings of them?
Yes! Too many recordings!
http://jollyrogertelephone.com/broadside-attack-on-windows-support-valentines-day-2017/
Thanks for the reply, and those are hilarious, but I mean the conversations where someone calls you and the bot answers, as opposed to vice versa.
Great service! Keep up the good work.
I am bothered by these blocks which, so far, I ignore by simply turning off my computer, then turning it back on. So far, so good.
Is there any way to do the same thing with a smart phone, specifically an android phone? I would love to do this to the marketers who call me.
I have did the same thing some 7 years back with a Symbian phones, but I’d be manually play clips from movies. Now phones are as advanced as PCs. I was wondering if we could do the same in smart phones too.
My brother just got this message on his computer, titled “Windows Defender Alert : Zeus Virus Detected In Your Computer !” with a popup asking for username and password. Several references to call this phone number:
888-539-6456
(which I Googled, and is evidently registered to “Iris Ct, Columbus, Georgia”…pretty sure that ain’t Microsoft)
Please nuke them.
Take care with the word nuke. These days, a poorly written keyword search by a government agency could think you are encouraging a nuclear assault on the southeast US.
Are there any black Escalades screeching up in your lawn yet? 🙂
Ha ha! That is funny. I assure you,
he isI am perfectly safe, and not at all in custody or being interrogated for serious threats using WMDs.If there were any danger, I would trust my government to protect me! That’s why it’s always better to speak positively about the great, wonderful, and – most of all – near-omniscient US Government.
In fact, I’d have to say that Donald Trump is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.
Agreed, and I would love to hear him explain how great he is to Salty Sally for about 45 minutes.
I know who did this
BRILLIANT! Talk about turning the tables on the scammers! LOVE it! Wish I was brilliant enough to create something like this! LOL!!!
This is wonderful! Can you go after US Pharmacy next? They call nonstop!
I have an old man bot named Whitey Whitebeard. He does a great job with those guys. Do they call your mobile or landline? If landline, I can usually intercept them automatically with the Landlubber service. For mobiles, I have a couple of options but it’s not as easy. Email me at support@jollyrogertelephone.com if I can help you get it set up!
Roger
Good post, keep
We decided to take on fake tech support scam pages and sites which flood the google search results.
Check it out: https://fatsecurity.com/activism/report-a-scam
Okay i am a guy who got tricked working in one of these scam companies and I know everything about how they trick I want to join your campaign. Most of them are in India and they all have fake English names and fake accent
My parents keep receiving robo calls from a company claiming to be Apple Support. The recording states that their ip address has been compromised and that they need to call 844-822-2855. They’ve been receiving multiple calls like this every day. Can you please add this scam number to your list?
Thanks,
Paul
I’m sorry to hear about the hassle with your parents. If it’s to their landline, then I can intercept the call with a robot if you’d like.
As for that number, I have added it to my logs and will hit it later. I wonder what happens when a “windows user” bot calls the apple support number?
You could add a few random phrases like “Yeah there’s this Parallels/Boot Camp thing…” it might help divert or otherwise monkey wrench the scammer’s train of thought and result in something fun.
This however assumes the Apple scammers are better trained than most Windows scammess are.
Apple are notorious for enforcing their brand. I wonder if the scammer knows that even talking about an Apple product to an unauthorized support representative sometimes results in loud sirens, flashbangs and “EVERYBODY FREEZE”, chaotic screaming and the distinct sound of automatic weapon fire. Maybe a “Where is my baby?!?” near the end.
I have a number to add for the IRS scam, 1-724-204-1209. Claims IRS is filing lawsuite against you. Not the IRS or a lawsuite but IRS and lawsuite. LOL
Bummer! I was too late! This number has been cycled already. I’m getting ring-no-answer on it.
I haven’t tried calling this number, but since it made its way through my Google Voice number, it must be a new one. It is:
561-717-0217
So, possibly worth adding to the known list, unless they’re spoofing someone’s number.
Oh, and look at that. I just received a “call for loan forgiveness” text to my phone’s native number. They want me (you) to call:
561-717-2726
RDN/Trojan.worm “infection”
Call “Microsoft Technical Support” 1-888-549-6780 Toll Free
Have seen a few of these on my kids PC’s in the past few weeks. Have fun with this one.
Thanks for your efforts on this Jolly Roger! This is both entertaining, and quite rewarding in twisted kind of way!
These freaks have called me many times to scam me 1-800-351-8816
They always say they are from Microsoft.
Please someone fuck them up as my 89 years old aunt has lost $3500 to them. 🙁
1-800-351-8816
Sorry I missed this, Allen. I tried the number but it’s dead now. If you hear of another, please let me know and I should see it. I just missed this comment. I’m so sorry! Roger