Brother
Professional
- Messages
- 2,590
- Reaction score
- 533
- Points
- 113
The FBI reported the arrest of two suspects, Roman Leyva and Ariful Haque, who lured their victims to fake tech support sites and tricked them into paying for their "services." According to the investigation, the fraudsters deceived more than 7,500 people (most of whom were elderly people with no technical knowledge) and earned more than $ 10,000,000 from this.
The scammers followed the classic pattern of running malicious sites with fake pop-ups that alerted visitors to security issues, thereby intimidating victims into believing their computers were infected with malware or other problems. The victims of the scam were advised to urgently call the technical support number, whose operators tricked the callers into paying for unnecessary "repairs" and "assistance". The cost of such services, disguised as one-time, annual or lifetime technical support, ranged from several hundred to several thousand US dollars.
Law enforcement officials report that some of the victims were deceived even twice. The fact is that sometimes, after a while, the scammers themselves called back the victims and claimed that the technical support company with which the victims entered into a contract had ceased to exist. The scammers offered to return the money to the victims, but soon they called back again and said that they had sent too much due to a typo (that is, for example, they transferred $ 4,500 instead of $ 450). They then asked the victims to return the difference in gift cards to them.
The indictment states that Leyva and Hack's fraudulent scheme was in effect from March 2015 to December 2018. The suspects founded special companies through which they passed their income and fraudulent payments, and also had a number of accomplices involved in the same activity.
Both suspects have been charged with electronic communications fraud and conspiracy to commit such fraud. The maximum sentence for these charges is up to 20 years in prison.
