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Technical Support Scams (TSS), which combine online abuse with socialengineering over the phone channel, have persisted despite several lawenforcement actions. The tactics used by these scammers have evolved over timeand they have targeted an ever increasing number of technology brands. Althoughrecent research has provided insights into TSS, these scams have now evolved toexploit ubiquitously used online services such as search and sponsoredadvertisements served in response to search queries. We use a data-drivenapproach to understand search-and-ad abuse by TSS to gain visibility into theonline infrastructure that facilitates it. By carefully formulating techsupport queries with multiple search engines, we collect data about both thesupport infrastructure and the websites to which TSS victims are directed whenthey search online for tech support resources. We augment this with a DNS-basedamplification technique to further enhance visibility into this abuseinfrastructure. By analyzing the collected data, we demonstrate that techsupport scammers are (1) successful in getting major as well as custom searchengines to return links to websites controlled by them, and (2) they are ableto get ad networks to serve malicious advertisements that lead to scam pages.Our study period of 8 months uncovered over 9,000 TSS domains, of both passiveand aggressive types, with minimal overlap between sets that are reached viaorganic search results and sponsored ads. Also, we found over 2,400 supportdomains which aid the TSS domains in manipulating organic search results.Moreover, we found little overlap with domains that are reached via abuse ofdomain parking and URL-shortening services which was investigated previously.Thus, investigation of search-and-ad abuse provides new insights into TSStactics and helps detect previously unknown abuse infrastructure thatfacilitates these scams.

By Hook or by Crook: Exposing the Diverse Abuse Tactics of Technical Support Scammers