Three individuals have been arrested on charges related to running tech support scams for several years. The victims were mostly elderly who stated they were tricked into paying for fake computer repair services. Allegedly pretending to be affiliated with major tech companies, Gunjit Malhotra, Gurjet Singh, and Jas Pal accessed victims' computers and caused them to malfunction in order to convince that repairs were required. This scam was allegedly being conducted for about seven years, between 2013 and 2019, and used multiple companies to charge for the fake computer services, making in excess of $1.3 million. In a complaint filed by FBI Special Agent Carie Jeleniewski, the trio engaged in cold calling the victims, a tactic typical for tech support scams, claiming to be from world-known computer companies and warning the victims that their computer was infected with a virus. They also waited for victims to call them, most likely after seeing fake messages falsely alerting hem that their computer systems had been infected. This was also a common tactic and relied on users' clicking the wrong link and landing on fraudulent websites. After establishing contact, the scammers deceived the victims with offers of repair and disinfection services and convinced them to give remote access to their computers. The complaint further stated that three people opened bank accounts for the following entities: "22nd Century ITC," "Pro Advisor Solutions," "NY Software Solutions Inc," "Seasia Consulting Inc," "Sav IT," and "Reussite Technologies." Checks from the victims were paid to these companies and others. Most of the victims paid amounts between $225 and $799, for fake multi-year service plans. To seal the deal, the tech support scams sometimes said that the attacks were coming from Russian hackers. One of the victims in the complaint was scammed for over $136,600 through dozens of calls from the tech support scammers. The story was that her computers had "network system security" and "networking hardware" problems. Continue reading on OUR FORUM.

A series of web sites are pushing a scam promising $5-30 worth of free bitcoins a day simply by running their Bitcoin Collector program. In reality, this program does nothing but install ransomware or password-stealing Trojans onto a victim's computer. This scam was first discovered by a malware researcher going by the alias Frost who posted about it on Twitter and discussed it with BleepingComputer.com. The scam is promoted through sites that promise to earn you Ethereum by referring other people to their site.  Their FAQ states that by referring 1,000 visits using your referral link you will earn 3 Ethereum, which is worth approximately $750 USD. The claims of earning free Ethereum is not even a real scam. As you can see from the above image, they advertise that you can earn $15-45 a day in Bitcoin "for free and automatically". If you click on this box, you will be brought to another page that promotes a program called "Bitcoin Collector" that when download and run will supposedly generate free Bitcoin for you. It even provides a VirusTotal link to show that it is completely safe, but even though this program has not detections, it is still a Trojan that normally would execute a malicious payload if the payload was present. Depending on the running campaign, this payload is either a ransomware or a password-stealing Trojan. BleepingComputer has executed both of these campaigns and describe them briefly below. The interesting aspect of this cryptocurrency scam is that by the attackers promising free Ethereum by referring users to the site, they effectively gain free promotion for their "BotCollector" Trojan and thus more opportunities to infect visitors. This scam has now switched its payload to an information-stealing Trojan. Frost has told BleepingComputer that this is the Baldr infection, which currently has 32/70 detections at VirusTotal. For this complete article visit OUR FORUM.