Greybytes Computer Maintenance & Support Scam
This particular company has been very active in the Irish market in recent times. We’ve had complaints from numerous clients over the past few weeks that they’ve received unsolicited ‘cold calls’ from a company called Greybytes. The call is, as is usual with these Computer Maintenance or Technical Support Scams (click on the link, we’ve featured these scams before on the site), from an Indian or Pakistani caller. It will typically start by them telling you that they have found ‘virus or malware activity’ either ‘on their servers’ or ‘following a scan through their network’.
What throws a lot of people is that the callers often know your surname, simply because they’ve got your phone number from the Golden Pages webiste. This introduces an element of believability to the call and imparts a level of trust that these scams need in order to convince the defrauded party to part with information such as their credit card details.
This Greybytes one (www.greybytes.net) is a particularly nasty piece of work because the website, at first glance, looks perfectly believable. If you look through it in more detail you’ll find that the English included is not written by a native English speaker. There’s nothing particularly wrong with this, but it often indicates sites that have not got the best intentions of the ‘client’ at heart. This site is no different. The company will also guide you through payment via their website payment system, which looks vaguely legitimate and will even give you an invoice and Technical Support contact number. This is a most unusual step for such fraudulent companies, and a message that they are making enough money to allow them to blur the boundaries between a legitimate and fraudulent company.
Greybytes intentions, no matter what else they may tell you, is simply to defraud you of your money either directly by signing up for their service (not even a cheap service, it’s quite expensive, even if you were to receive the offered technical support – see here) or via access to your machine once you’ve visited the site address they give you.
The company uses perfectly legal and legitimate software such as LogMeIn (via its www.logmein123 – LogMeIn Rescue website) or Ammyy (www.ammyy.com/en/) to get you to allow them to have remote access to your PC. At this stage they can take pretty much anything they like from your macine – Visa Card details (if they haven’t got them from you already), bank details, logins, etc. Although the company will tell you that it is based in Ireland, it is not (even though it sports an Irish flag on its web page). It is, in fact, registered to an Indian national in Kolkata called Devjoy Mitra (see here).
To add insult to injury, if you purchase their services the company will give you a ‘Technical Help Phone Number’ which is a tolled number, so you’ll pay them even more money. It varies from case to case, but this one is often used - 01865589088.
It has caused untold problems in New Zealand and Australia already, if you do an internet search for the company you’ll find a number of threads dedicated to the scam operation. If you have been scammed by this company please contact us as you will need to have the software they installed removed and, if they have charged your Visa card or Master Card you will need to write to your Credit Card company to ask to have the transaction reversed. You should also contact the Gardaí Bureau of Fraud Investigation (GBFI) at Harcourt Street (you can email them on checks@iol.ie) to inform them of the unsolicited call and fraudulent transactions.
As a general rule it is wise to remember that no legitimate company will ever make an unsolicited cold call to you about computer maintenance, so if you get one just hang up on them, you’ll save yourself a lot of trouble.
What catches most people is that they claim they can see ‘virus activity’ from your machine on their servers. Remember that they cannot see your computer at all, they tell everybody this, to get you to give them access to your machine.
If you think you may have a problem with your PC, shut it down and give a local computer repair technician a call immediately, do not allow these scam operators to make money and continue their fraudulent activity at your expense.
