Tech Support Scammer Gets Seven Years in Prison for Stealing $6 Million from Elderly Victims

The US Department of Justice has announced a seven-year sentence for the leader of a scam center that exploited elderly victims by remotely accessing their computers and convincing victims to pay for fake computer support services.

From around March 2015 through July 2018, Vinoth Ponmaran led a criminal fraud ring based in the U.S. and India that carried out a technical support fraud scheme targeting elderly victims across the US and Canada.

Classic tech-support scam

“The Fraud Ring’s primary objective was to trick victims into believing that their computers were infected with malware in order to deceive them into paying hundreds or thousands of dollars for phony computer repair services,” says the DOJ.

According to court filings and court statements, including Ponmaran’s guilty plea, the scam involved displaying pop-up windows on victims’ computers that falsely claimed a virus had infected the system.

The DOJ doesn’t say exactly how the scammers found their victims, but presumably they used spray-and pray tactics, phishing sites, or even capitalized on actual malware infections.

“The pop-up windows directed the victims to call a particular telephone number to obtain technical support,” according to the press release.

In some cases, the pop-up windows threatened that, if the victim restarted or shut down their computer, it could “cause serious damage to the system,” including “complete data loss.”

To give a false sense of legitimacy, the pop-ups sometimes bore the logos of famous tech companies.

“In fact, no virus had infected victims’ computers, and the technical support phone numbers in the pop-up windows were not associated with the legitimate technology company,” says the DOJ. “Rather, these representations were false and were designed to trick victims into paying the Fraud Ring to ‘fix’ a problem that did not exist.”

While the purported “virus” was a hoax, the pop-ups themselves actually did cause some computers to “freeze,” making for a convincing technical issue and causing victims to dial the number and ask for help.

Victims paid hundreds or even thousands of dollars, depending on the required “service.” The scammers then remotely accessed the victim’s computers and ran a free anti-virus tool.

The three-year operation generated more than $6 million in proceeds from at least 6,500 victims, court filings say,

The 36-year-old, India-based Ponmaran has been sentenced to seven years in a US prison, three years of supervised release and the forfeiture of $6.1 million.

Ponmaran’s co-conspirators were also sentenced this week.

Be proactive

According to the Bitdefender 2024 Consumer Cybersecurity Assessment Report, netizens' biggest cybercrime fear is having their money stolen. Yet people generally avoid even the easy steps that could help keep fraudsters at bay.

Bitdefender recently published a straightforward guide on how to exercise good cybersecurity hygiene to combat the rising tide of scams targeting regular folk.

Read: Make It Hard for Scammers to Get You! Use These Seven Vital Tips.

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