Acuta Technologies: Tech Support Scammers who Pretend to be Visa

Popular scambaiting YouTuber Jim Browning recently posted a new scambaiting video on his channel. The video exposes Acuta Technologies as being tech support who scam people by pretending to be many different companies.

Jim Browning received an automated text-to-voice phone claiming to be from “Visa Secure”. The call claimed that payment of £600 was made from an account and gave instructions to press one to talk to a representative. Jim Browning received an automated text-to-voice phone claiming to be from “Visa Secure”. The call claimed that payment of £600 was made from an account and gave instructions to press one to talk to a representative.

The scammer answered by claiming they were from BT Broadband. This of cause makes no sense if a phone call was claiming to be from Visa. The scammer would go on to make some excuses about people from Manchester trying to take money with the help on an internet line.

Jim Browning would then be asked to download Teamviewer to allow the scammer to connect to his computer. The scammer would then do the normal tech support scam stuff like doing ping tests and running the tree command.

The Transferwise Wire Scam

This is where the scam takes an interesting turn as this is not your normal tech support scam. Acuta Technologies has a special scam where they black out your screen and set up a TransferWise account on your behalf. To verify that TransferWise account, the scammers ask for a lot of personal information and ask that you give them a scan of your passport. 

The scammers than go on to make a transfer request for £7,999 to a company in Singapore. They then ask the victim to place their ID into a scanner to allow them to make a scan that they can submit to TransferWise. To convince the victim to give over the ID, they claim it is needed to secure their bank account.

As the victims’ screen is blacked out they are unable to see what the scammer is doing on their computer. This means that the victim does not know that nearly eight-thousand pounds are being transferred from their account.

The Attempted Cover-up by Acuta Technologies

After Jim Browning published his video on Acuta Technologies, the company took action to hide their activity. This included removing their website and social media accounts and even trying to get the video taken down with a privacy complaint.

Published: 27th August 2019