Our APWG eCrimes Paper on Tech Support Scam Facebook Groups

My colleague Raghavendra Cherupalli will be at APWG eCrime next month sharing a paper based on our research into the Facebook Groups where illicit Indian Call Centers share "Crime-as-a-Service" offerings with one another.

In our paper, "Classification of Cybercriminal Posts Using Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Study on Tech Support Scam Marketplaces," Raghavendra will be sharing how he and the team have categorized 380,000 posts from 90 of these groups to determine the nature and most prominent trends in these groups. Since our initial dataset was gathered, my colleagues at DarkTower have gathered nearly a million additional posts from hundreds of similar Facebook groups. (And yes, we've reported these groups to Meta, who has terminated a few dozen, but hundreds more reports were rejected as "not violating community standards.) We can't wait to get Raghavendra to run his analysis on the expanded dataset!

What type of groups and posts are we talking about? Here's a sampling:

"Buy Sell Popup Calls" says the 1700 member group was created "basically for both buyers and sellers to buy and sell the tech support pop up calls." The most recent post in that group, offering Facebook phishing kits, is by a user called "Hex Manual." We reported that post to Facebook, who responded that it does not violate Community Standards. (His post also includes a fake FTC phishing page.)

One of the posters in this group is Manoj Singh. His post advertises his email blasting services, where he sends emails imitating Geek Squad, PayPal, Norton, and Microsoft to cause calls going to the purchaser's illicit call center. 

Manoj is an admin of several groups and has posted his ads to at least 17 additional groups with 143,230 total members (as of 12OCT2025.)

Krati-Krati advertises that he can provide "Blue Screen of Death" calls filtered for people who are 50+ years old and pop-ups on IOS devices filtered for people who are 45+ years old.

Brijesh Mohan offers calls, but also provides Zelle, Google Pay, Apple Pay, Venmo, CashApp, and Canadian Interac accounts that can be used for money laundering quick payments from North American victims.

While these examples, and hundreds of thousands of similar ones, are easily obtainable, Raghavendra and his professors at the University of Tulsa, Tyler Moore, Yi Ting Chua, and Weiping Pei have developed some awesome tech for analyzing these messages in bulk. That is necessary to gain true understanding of these scams!

We'd be thrilled to have you attend his presentation!  With this year's conference in San Diego, it would be a great opportunity to attend an APWG eCrime Research event! Get your tickets and register here ==> https://apwg.org/events/ecrime2025