That support number on a site you trust may not be support

Somebody published a page on BuzzFeed offering customer support for Malwarebytes, with a phone number to call. Malwarebytes had nothing to do with it, and found on 27 August that the same number had already done service impersonating McAfee and Norton.

The trick works because of where the listing sits rather than what it says. Plenty of well-known sites accept posts, listings or classified ads from the public, and search engines rank those pages on the strength of the domain they live on. So you search for a company's support number, a result comes back on a site you've read for years, and the number on it feels checked. It isn't. Nobody at BuzzFeed vetted a phone number, any more than a marketplace vets the seller of a cheap antivirus licence. Malwarebytes' own research found 47% of people run into scams on social media at least once a week and 36% on buying-and-selling platforms.

Call the number and the script is the one that's been running for a decade. A friendly agent asks to connect to your computer to take a look, finds something alarming, and the conversation turns into a payment: a fee for a fix you didn't need, or a "refund" that requires gift cards or crypto to process. The FTC's guidance puts the tell plainly, and it applies here too: a genuine security warning from a real company never asks you to phone anyone.

The fix is a small habit. Get a support number from inside the app you're paying for, or from the address you typed into the bar yourself, and never from a search result, however respectable the site around it looks. It also helps to have your own read on whether the PC is actually in trouble, because that's the lever these calls pull. Tendvane's Health score gives you a plain summary of how the machine is doing, so a stranger's claim that it's infected has something honest to be checked against.