|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Inside the office where a call centre had been scamming Canadians, the workers didn’t see the CBC Marketplace crew coming. Sitting in a low-rise building along a busy Mumbai street, they froze when confronted by journalists demanding to know why they had been intimidating vulnerable Canadians on the other side of their world.
Everything stopped. Calls ended abruptly. None of the workers spoke. Their faces were clearly stunned at what may have been the first-ever intrusion into an operation that has existed openly, but largely without interference from law enforcement.
Marketplace‘s efforts to locate those behind the tech support scam spanned months, including cultivating a relationship with someone inside the operation; it ended in a late-night dash up three flights of stairs into the call centre.
Tech support scams — which involve fraudsters posing as support staff, oftentimes from legitimate well-known companies, like Microsoft, Google or Apple — are nothing new. But they continue to plague North Americans, bilking people of millions each year.
“Around the globe, we found that two out of three people had experience with the tech support scam,” said Microsoft’s chief digital safety officer, Courtney Gregoire, whose company is frequently named in the scammers’ online pop-ups or phone calls.
[…]
