Criminals extorted money from Internet users, making them believe that their computer was blocked.
Some victims were quick to call the phone number displayed on their screen… Obviously, it was a scam.
Web scams, again and again
It has been a proven fact for a few years now, scams have been multiplying on the web, but also now via SMS or even on WhatsApp. The French are also the preferred target of pirates in Europe. If some scams quickly display a grotesque side, others are sometimes subtly carried out, so that they manage to deceive thousands of people.
For criminals, any pretext is good when it comes to stealing a few euros from a victim. False inheritance, package blocked at customs, expired vital card, CPF, insulation at 1 euro, animal condemned to certain death… There are many scams. The police recently dismantled a network of hackers whose main technique was to make Internet users believe that their computer was blocked.
You can fool a thousand people once…
Just under ten people were arrested by various sections of the judicial police. The suspects worked for two companies based in Montpellier and Saint-Dié-des-Vosges, which extracted sums ranging from a few hundred to nearly 2,000 euros from thousands of Internet users.
The scam was simple: display a message on the victim’s computer, indicating that the PC was malfunctioning. The victim was then invited to call a telephone number to restore the PC to perfect working order, provided of course that they pay a little money to pay the (fake) technician on the phone.
Worse still, according to What to choose :
” The scammers even went so far as to contact some victims later, posing as a service supposed to allow them to recover the money stolen from them. Those who transmitted their bank account details (RIB) were certainly extorted a second time. »
This large-scale scam is said to have enabled one of the two companies to generate a total of 1.2 million euros, in the space of just four months. Distrust is therefore always in order when you encounter an unusual or suspicious message, whether on your PC or your smartphone.
Source : What to choose
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