The IT Nerd

Fun fact. Or perhaps not such a fun fact. More and more companies have done away with having a phone number that you can call for technical support. Having a tech support line and staffing it with competent people is a cost that businesses want to avoid. So these businesses have moved to doing email or online support such as a chat bot as that’s much cheaper. But many consumers are used to calling someone for help with their tech. Scammers know this and have filled in the void by creating technical support scams that are easy for the unsuspecting to find via a Google search. What I mean by that is that scammers will poison Google search results so that their scams pop up first as the natural human tendency is to click on the first, second or third result in a Google search. Then if the unsuspecting person calls the number, bad things will happen to them.

That’s what happened to an elderly couple yesterday. They had their Bell Fibe modem replaced yesterday and everything was fine except their Brother printer which was wireless wouldn’t print. So they Googled for a tech support number for Brother and somehow ended up in the hands of a company called Stallions Geek Solutions. More on them later. But what happened over the next hour or so was that someone who provided this couple his first name and employee number (Top tip: If a tech support person gives you only their first name and employee number on a phone call, that should be a red flag that something might be up as no legitimate tech support organization would ever do that) used TeamViewer to connect into their Mac to attempt to fix the problem. When the printer still wasn’t working, he claimed that this was a “driver issue”, and then said that he would have to escalate this to someone senior who would call them back, and it would cost them $200 to fix the problem. But first the couple would have to fill out a form that was asking for all sorts of personal information. The couple did start to do that but got suspicious and hung up the phone. That’s when I got a phone call that made me drop what I was doing to drive to their home and investigate.

Now the actual problem with the printer was really simple. The printer as I said earlier was a wireless one. So when Bell replaced the modem, nobody updated the printer’s wireless configuration so that it knew how to connect to the new modem. That’s why it wouldn’t work, and that took me a grand total of four minutes to sort out. Any person with even a basic understanding of how this stuff works who listened to the situation should have come to that conclusion. But clearly these scammers weren’t competent enough to do that. Or they were simply too focused on putting on a show so that they could execute their scam.

When I examined the Mac, I found a copy of TeamViewer. And based on the TeamViewer logs, it looks like the scammer tried to set it up so that they could connect to the computer any time they wanted. But they failed miserably in doing so. I didn’t find any evidence of any other remote access software like ConnectWise which is a favourite of scammers these days. So while I have to follow up with them in a few days, I felt confident in saying that their Mac was clean. And I think what saved them from something much worse happening was that the scammer didn’t really know his way around a Mac, and they refused to give the scammer their admin password for the Mac. If they did, he could have done anything he wanted. But they didn’t which limited what the scammer could do.

So, who are these Stallion Geek Solutions people? Using the number that they called, I managed to hunt down their website. Now I won’t post the URL for the website, but I will show you what it looks like:

It looks pretty. But to be totally honest, it’s one of the worst websites that I have ever seen. The text on it would make an English teacher cringe. It was clearly written by someone whose first language wasn’t English and the text that is there seems to be there to fill in space so that it makes this business look legitimate. Or put another way, they’re likely hoping that people won’t look at the details of the website and come to the conclusion that this business isn’t who they say that they are. To add to that, some of the links on the website go nowhere, which for a company who claims that they do web design among other things is pretty bad. For fun I checked their domain registration and found that the domain was registered in Europe. But all the administrative and technical contact info had been redacted for privacy. That isn’t unusual in isolation. But it combined with what else I am going to serve up makes this company look suspect.

This company had a Canadian address, but when I looked at it on Apple Maps, it was in a home in suburban Toronto. Again, by itself that’s not unusual. But when I checked to see what “Printer Services” that they offered, this made it unusual:

This was on the same page as their Canadian address. So are they in Canada or Australia? I’m guessing that they’re at neither place. Or maybe the Canadian address is some sort of front for the company as Apple Maps lists the company as operating out of the home that I spoke of earlier. And the company is elsewhere on the planet.

Finally, the phone number that the couple phoned has been implicated in a pop up scam back in 2022. I discovered that by running the number through a number of Scambaiter websites and getting a few hits. Such as this one:

In case you’re not familiar with the term, scambaiters are basically people who go after scammers by pranking them and doing everything that they can to disrupt their operations as it’s difficult if not next to impossible to get scammers arrested. Thus they feel that vigilante justice is better than no justice.

There’s enough evidence here that I think that I can conclude that this company was out to scam this couple. And that this company likely are some sort of scam operation. As part of this incident I submitted the log files from TeamViewer and passed them along to TeamViewer so that they can take action against these scammers. Which means that TeamView can use these logs to remotely disable their software so that the scammers can’t use it. That will put them out of business for a bit until they find some other remote access software to use.

Now if you need tech support for some piece of tech, Google is not your friend. Like I said earlier, scammers will do things to ensure when the search results pop up, they appear ahead of legitimate companies. Thus my recommendation is to go directly to the official website of the product manufacturer and only use their official channels for tech support. And if they don’t have actual phone support, don’t go hunting for some sort of phone number. That will only end badly for you because there are no “secret” or “unpublished” phone numbers for tech support, despite what you might have heard.

I’ll be updating this story with new information as warranted. But for now, consider this situation a cautionary tale of what can happen if you are not careful in terms of how you’re looking for tech support for the tech that you own.