A Malwarebytes employee has spotted a new iCloud scam attempt. Twice in one day, she received unsolicited phone calls, supposedly from Apple Support, claiming that her iCloud account had been hacked “by Russian hackers,” and asking for her account information.

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The internet has been awash with all manner scams for a long time. The variety boggles the imagination, ranging from Nigerian princes wanting to pay strangers exorbitant sums for help moving some money, to Facebook posts asking if it’s really you in this photo, to “one weird trick” for just about anything you might want to do. Although not exactly new, one of these scams has seen an upswing in recent months: the fake tech support scam.
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Controversy about MacKeeper has been around almost as long as MacKeeper has existed. It is one of the most aggressively-marketed products in the Mac world, and there are numerous accusations that it isn’t useful or even that it is fraudulent. At the same time, you will find a number of positive reviews out there. How do you know what’s true? In this article, I will make the case that MacKeeper, and the company behind it (ZeoBIT/Kromtech), are not to be trusted.
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On Tuesday, I posted an article about a potentially malicious Genieo installer. This has resulted in a couple anti-virus companies labeling the Genieo software as a trojan. Intego revealed an interesting discovery, and I’ve also been pursuing some interesting points myself. There are some interesting developments that call into question whether this is just an isolated incident involving one of Genieo’s partners, or a problem with Genieo itself.
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For at least a couple months now, I have been hearing a lot of reports of fake Flash update notices appearing on a variety of different web sites, and resulting in the download of a Genieo installer. It has been difficult to track down a source, so that I could see this in action, but I finally found one. Although I still don’t believe that Genieo is actually malware, there is definitely some monkey business going on.
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I have seen a number of complaints on the Apple Support Communities forums lately about fake Macs being sold online. Thus far, every complaint has centered around a 17″ retina MacBook Pro, sold for pretty exorbitant prices ($5,000 in the most recent case). In all cases that I have seen, folks have ended up coming to the ASC to complain that the machine has not arrived yet.
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Two weeks ago, I wrote about trust issues and fake tech support scams. Coincidentally, it would seem, I got a very concerning e-mail message from a friend of mine yesterday relating to exactly those issues. The incident I’m about to relate is, in fact, so concerning that I feel warning people immediately is of utmost importance.
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Right in line with yesterday’s theme involving trust, I have been reminded of yet another trust issue. When you call tech support for a particular product, your goal is probably to talk to an official representative of the company that makes that product. If you want support for an Apple device, you’re going to call Apple’s tech support, right? Unfortunately, a couple times in the last two weeks, I have seen people fooled into calling a company that is pretending to offer official Apple support.
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