Victim Location 46037
Type of a scam Tech Support
A pop-up appeared covering the entire screen of our Mac desktop accompanied by a shrill blaring horn with a message that the desktop had been hacked and to call the number listed immediately. A voice answered immediately saying "this is your technical support" and giving us the impression that the MS-Squad team was part of Apple Tech Support. He said he would need to take over control of the screen in order to determine if it had been hacked. Once having control of the screen he scrolled through data on the screen which listed names of people we didn’t know who had been in our email. He also said it looked like nothing else had been compromised and that he could fix it, but since our Mac was beyond the 5 yr Apple service agreement, we would need to pay first. He said the charge to fix the current problem would be $349.99 + $149.99 for tech support. He then asked us how many devices we had in our home and quoted us a price for lifetime tech support on them for an additional $549.99. We selected the entire package and said we would pay with a credit card. He got the billing dept on the line who told us they could no longer accept credit cards for this type work due to a recently passed federal law….they could only accept electronic checks. An electronic check form appeared on the screen with the amount quoted and he said we needed to insert our bank routing number and account number and electronically sign it which we did. At that time the first person we talked with came back on the line. He installed malwarebytes on the desktop and scrolled Through more data on the screen before telling us everything had been cleaned up and confirmed that the hackers had not been beyond email.
This process ended around 5 pm on a Saturday. The next morning we weren’t feeling so good about what had transpired, so we called Apple tech support who confirmed our fears. The Apple person walked us through removing everything that looked suspicious on the desktop and checked afterwards to make sure it was clean. She also advised us to call the national call center of our bank to put a stop payment in place and to determine what additional steps needed to be taken on Monday with our local bank. She also advised us to file a police report and change all email passwords. We followed her recommendations and were able to successfully stop payment and convert to a different bank account. We also changed our email passwords and filed the police report.