The other day, my elderly neighbor came to see me, looking extremely troubled.
We have a good relationship as neighbors; we always greet each other when we cross paths, and she kindly cares about my children as well.
When I listened to her story, it seemed her computer screen suddenly went weird while she was working on it.
She was told on the screen, "Your PC is broken. If you buy 100,000 yen worth of Apple Store cards, it will be fixed permanently," so she rushed out to a convenience store in a panic.
There, a quick-thinking clerk stopped her, suggesting it might be a scam, and gave her the police's phone number. However, she didn't have her phone with her, so she came asking to borrow mine.
Why didn't she have her own phone?
Upon asking, she said the scam group had instructed her to "leave the phone connected," so she had left her home phone off the hook. This is the completely typical modus operandi of a tech support scam.
I lent her my smartphone to call the police, and while waiting for their arrival, I decided to wait with her at her house.
When I looked at the problematic PC screen, I was a little surprised.
A mechanical voice and an alarm sound saying "Your PC is broken, contact support immediately" were piercingly loud.
If it were just that, it would be a common fake alert, but shockingly, they were checking our situation through the PC's camera and freely moving the mouse to "remotely control" it.
I happened to be wearing a mask and a hat, but I didn't realize it was being remotely controlled at first, so I think they managed to take my picture.
I hurriedly hid the camera physically and desperately kept moving the mouse to obstruct them so they couldn't control it.
After struggling over the cursor for a while, the other side seemed to give up and stopped doing anything.
Checking the download folder, there was an unfamiliar file that my neighbor didn't recognize.
Most likely, when she clicked a fake warning banner while browsing and called the contact number displayed, they cleverly talked her into downloading this file and opened a path for remote access.
Honestly, I was surprised because I didn't think these scams had become sophisticated enough to reach the level of remote control.
I honestly don't know whether the footage shot by the camera has been saved on their end via the internet.
For now, the convenience store clerk's great play prevented any financial damage. That's a huge relief.
However, what they did inside the PC during the "tens of minutes" she was away buying Apple Store cards is a complete black box.
It's quite terrifying to think they could have done anything during that time.
Afterward, I ran the virus scan software installed on the PC, just to confirm there were no suspicious files left behind, and then we parted ways.
I honestly told her, "If it were me, I'd feel creeped out and replace the whole PC, but looking solely at the scan results, it's not unusable. However, since we don't know what was done while you were away, it might be best to prepare yourself for a certain level of data leakage."
If I were to fall into the same situation, I'm confident I wouldn't fall for the scam itself (like buying the cards).
But if that blaring warning sound suddenly went off and my PC started being remotely controlled on its own, I'd definitely panic quite a bit.
I thought it was genuinely scary.
And this whole incident made me realize something once again.
My personal information is already held and handled by countless other people and systems.
The idea of a "situation where my information isn't leaked anywhere" is an impossibility in the modern age.
We simply have no choice but to live our lives accepting that risk as something "already factored in" to some extent.
It was an incident that made me keenly aware that this is the kind of era we are in.
📅