By now we would hope that most of you guys are wise to more common scams, like the infamous “Nigerian prince” scam, phishing scams, or tech support scams, where someone pretends to be tech support from a company like Microsoft, and they claim your PC will need additional software to fix the problem that you’d have to pay for.
However it seems that there are still people falling for such scams which might explain why they’re still around, although one man by the name of Ivan Kwiatkowski has turned the tables on the scammers by scamming them into installing ransomware on their computers, which should hopefully put them out of business for a while.
Basically how it works, as detailed on Kwiatkowski’s blog (via Geek.com), is that he initially played along with the scammer’s requests, and even went as far as providing them with fake credit card numbers which obviously did not work. However halfway through he realized that the remote support software the scammers used to connect to him worked both ways.
This meant that files could be sent to the scammers as well, so he pulled out a ransomware he had lying around, disguised it as an image file that he told them was his credit card, and even convinced them to open it. Of course the image did not open but it did install the ransomware in the process. We’re not sure if it took effect but if it did, hopefully it puts these scammers out of commission for the next few days, or permanently.
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