Jurassic Park - 21st Anniversary

 

Yeaah….my favourite movie turned 21 yesterday ! And I still cannot get enough of it !

 

bombasticnerdtastic:

randomhouse:

“If you don’t know history, then you don’t know anything. You are a leaf that doesn’t know it is part of a tree. ” ― Michael Crichton

‎Michael Crichton, author (and screenwriter) of Jurassic Park, would have been 70 years old today. (October 23, 1942 - November 4, 2008)

Father of my franchise, brilliant mind - I don’t like some of his writing, but without him, my Jurassic Park life would not be possible. Thank you, Michael - and I hope you’re having a good afterlife.

 

Rain

 

I am home now, in my home state of Kerala. The monsoon has just hit the state, and its raining. It has been raining sporadically ever since I reached at 7:30 am. After a sumptuous lunch of home cooked, mom-made, chicken biriyani , I am now relaxing in my balcony. They sky is not overcast, there is no thunder or lightning. Just the gentle shower from the skies above.

Growing up in central Kerala, the rains were probably the most memorable, and frustrating parts of life. I have fond memories of rain drenched days from life in the countryside. It was my habit to always pack and umbrella whenever I went out, even when the forecast said otherwise. There were times I used to walk slowly when it started raining, when all around me, people would run helter skelter to the nearest building to stay dry. They would curse the rain Gods for opening up just when they were wearing their best clothes or were outside with their entire family, and there was only one, or no umbrellas go around. I could not understand (and still don’t) how a Malayalee could hate the rains, when clearly, it the most iconic gifts the little state has ben endowed with.

My only problem with rainy days was that they caused me to fall ill. A little bit of drizzle and I would start coughing and sneezing and wheezing..enough to worry my poor mom to start praying. Basically, illness would mean lost school days. Which in turn meant decrease of attendance. And then a general decreased performance in the next exams. Leading to lower grades. But otherwise, I had not problem in getting stuck at the town in knee deep water, or being splashed water by plying vehicles while I was minding my own business walking on the wrong side of the road. Or even being denied entry to packed buses because we students used to pay only half rates, but took up double the space due to our big, wet bags.

And the drenched clothes. Specially on Wednesday , when we had white uniforms. We used to wade through knee deep water wearing our pure white uniforms, and would return in Khakis ! Mom used to be very unhappy. And who can forget the smell of wet socks ? That was the only smell during our school days, because our school did not allow us to wear sandals, stick to the school uniform, they said.

Side effect of rains in Kerala was the guaranteed power cuts, all through the day and nights. It was time to pack up candles, torches, and Gelf-made emergency lanterns. Also the mosquito coils, otherwise you  could not sleep at all. In order to save on candlesticks, the whlie family used to huddle around a single candle, with the only other candle to be used in the kitchen. There were wax droppings all across the tables and the floor, sometimes even on our school books. We were encouraged to complete our home works and revisions when there still was day light or electricity in the home, so not to waste doing them during the power cuts. Of course, we spent all day making paper boats in the rain, so home works were done only at night.

They were fun days. And I miss them now more than ever. Now I don’t have time to stand and stare at the rain on the windows, or walk in the rain in gentle showers. I have to stay in office or home to keep myself dry. No one in office shares my enthu for rain. There are still powercuts , though. But then I am so tired by the day’s work, when the power goes out, I just fall into my bed and fall asleep, listening to nature’s lullaby.

Bangalore Days - Rocks like the city !

 

Watched the much awaited Malayalam multi-starrer movie Bangalore Days yesterday. And loved every bit of it. Here is another movie where the story and characters are the real driving force. Writer-Director  Anjali Menon sure does know how to create convincing characters. And boy, can she write ! There are few writers out there who can create and juggle so many characters  and still tie up all the loose ends together in a neat knot. If you are a Mallu, aged less than…maybe   40 years….then run to your nearest theatre and watch it !! Hurry !

 

Bangalore Days tells the story of three cousins, very much close to each other, even if their families don’t gell well, who travel to the big city for different reasons, and end up discovering each other and themselves all over again. It is a story of love, and hope, and everything in between. Don’t go by the movie name, the story & the characters are so good, that they could have very well named the movie Kochi Days, or Trivandrum Days…and it would still have worked. But there is something about this big grand city that attracts youngsters (and older ones too, apparently) , and the truly metropolitan environment means you meet people you hardly run into anywhere else. There is something for everyone here, I am sure each cinema goer will be able to relate to at least one of the many people depicted on screen.

The story is narrated by Kuttan (Nivin Pauly), who is a stereotype young Malayalee software engineer. Many stereotypes will be broken in this movie..even Kuttan’s. Kuttan has just landed a plush software engineer’s job out of Kerala, but is a homesick country man at hear. He runs home first chance he gets, and is clearly in love with his home and the green country side. He introduces us to his two cousins, who have different personalities, but the three of them are one happy bunch. Divya (Nazriya, in her most mature role so far) has just completed her graduation, and has MBA plans, but that goes out of the window when her family decides to get her married to a successful MBA manager,because her horoscope says so. She will have to relocate to Bangalore city, setting the stage for the story and the movie-name. The third wheel of this brat pack is Arjun (Dulquar), who is a born rule breaker, and loves his cousins, and loves to hate everyone else. He is a school drop-out , which means  he is tagged un-successful in life, but is most carefree, and manages to live on his own as a bike mechanic & racer. After Divya’s marriage, the cousins find reasons and move to Bangalore just so they can hang out together. Halfway through the movie, at the interval, their lives have changed; all three of them face problems in their lives. And then , in the second act, they all find their way back, magically.

Lets start with Kuttan. He is excited to move to the big city, but is not ready for the long office hours waiting for him. He also has a culture crash of sorts, his naadan (countryside) ideologies in harsh contrast with the new city life. He wants to marry a typical village belle, but meets and falls for the most unlikely candidate; Meenakshi an air-hostess he bumps into (Isha Talwar) on his first plane journey. He changes himself, for her, and starts dreaming of love..but his dreams come crashing when she runs back to an ex-boyfriend. Back home, his always ill father, has run away, lured by spirituality and faith, and he now has to take care of his mother, whom he reluctantly brings to Bangalore. Turns out, his father did not run away for God, but was actually running away from Kuttan’s mother. Its all not bad for him, as he finally understands the contrasting nature of his people, and renews his life with new hopes, after packing his mom to US to his elder sister.

Arjun is facing an identity crisis of his own, he is hot tempered and rude, and shuts everyone out, the only people he opens up to are his cousins. Backstory reveals that his parents are divorced, and that he ran away from school. He finds solace in the voice of an RJ in the city, who inspire him positively. When he finally meets her (Parvati) he sees someone who has lost more than himself, but has learnt to forget, and take life head-on. She is disabled from the waste below. He is reluctant to make the first move, as she is clearly setting out for a better life, with a university course abroad. She too hesitates, scared to fall for him who clearly has second thoughts. Eventually, he musters the courage to ask her to stay back, with the support of his family and biker friends.

But the track I liked best was Divya’ and Das’s , their married life, the turmoil and the way they overcame them. Divya , the extrovert, bubbly and highly optimistic little girl is excited to be married, and to move to Bangalore. She settles at once to her new life, enjoying the luxurious lifestyle , with her cousins for company. But her husband Das (Fahad Fazil) is a polar opposite, a corporate henchman, forever typing on his laptop, or travelling abroad for his work. He lives a strictly controlled life, and despises changes. He also has a past he is reluctant to talk about, and this is turned into a surprise twist in the their story towards the end. It turns out, Das used to be a champion motocross bike racer named Shiva, and was madly in love with Natasha (Nithya Menen, no dialogues for her). Natasha dies in a bike accident while Das was driving, and he has never come to forgive himself for his mistake, believing he killed her. Natasha’s parents hold him responsible, and he still mourns for her, turning one of his rooms into a sanctum-sanctorum for their memories. All this is revealed when Arjun joins Shiva’s earlier biking team. This twist was a pleasant surprise , not only did it add colour to Das’s dull life, but the backstory explained why he is they way he is. Divya decides not to run away, but to help Das come to terms with his past, even going as far to meet Natasha’s parents and speaking for him. Das finally lets go, and embraces his new life. This part reminded me of the character  Aditya Shroff from Rock On, who too has a bitter past, and has turned from Rock singer to a serious boring investment banker. Even there, it is his wife Sakshi, who helps him come back to love and life.

Apart from these main tracks, there are also many other characters in the movie, like Kuttan’s and Divya’s parents, extended relatives, and Divy’a neighbours from her flat, a bunch of colourful and relatable folk.

What stood out :

1. Background music. The visuals are eye-catching for sure, but the BGM adds a second layer of perspective, lots of guitar, violin and pianos, specially the bike scenes…oooh. Kudos to Gopi Sundar, from Kuttan’s hilarious theme-BGM to Arjun’s electric guitar theme, to he sure knows how to immerse the audience.  The songs rock too ! (searching for torrent)
2. Visuals..a cool and dry Bangalore, without the traffic and pollution. I dream of the Bangalore depicted in the city, where you can ride your four-wheeler care freely, but alas..that world exists only in movies.
3. My favourite scene: Divya helping Das cope. The BGM and visuals in these scenes were dream like.
4. The final race. The last 10 minutes shows Arjun competing in the motocross race, it was both poetic and exhilarating, the music, the editing..everything top notch. Picture perfect.
5. Disability. Sarah plays a paraplegic , and has difficulty moving around the city in her motorised wheelchair. There is a scene where Arjun jumps on the road to stop a bus for her. Disabled people face such transport problems everyday in our country, yet there is very much being done for them.
6. Natasha dies in a bike accident. I am all for safe driving. Road accidents kill  hundreds of people in our country every day. I hope this scene convinces people to ride safer on roads.

 

Anjali Menon has hit gold third time in  a row (or fourth, if you count Kerala Cafe). Three times lucky ? Naah, it three times hard work and persistence. Thank you for a lovely movie, Anjali.

The Pocket Watch Was The World’s First Wearable Tech Game Changer | Innovation

 

The Pocket Watch Was The World’s First Wearable Tech Game Changer | Innovation

Would you wear a computer on your wrist?

It’s a new high-tech debate, as “wearable” computers begin to go on sale. We’ve long grown accustomed to carrying a computer in our pockets—but now tech firms are betting we’d rather have one on our wrist, showing us our messages, social-networking pings, maybe some Google searches. Already, over 400,000 people bought Pebble smartwatches last year, and Google’s head-mounted Glass computer was released to over 10,000 early adopters. Apple is widely rumored to be putting out a smartwatch later this year.

For many, wearables seem like a final, crazed step in information overload: Tweets on your wrist! Supporters, however, claim that a smartwatch might actually be less annoying—because you can quickly glance at it.

This isn’t the first time we’ve run through this debate, though. To really understand how the wearable computer could change our lives, consider the impact of the original wearables—the pocket watch and the wristwatch.

Clocks began to transform everyday life as early as the medieval period, when church bells sounded the hours, letting villagers know the pace of the day. But timekeeping began to weave itself into day-to-day life in an entirely new way as clocks became more omnipresent and portable. Affordable pocket watches weren’t common until the 19th century, but once they arrived, they quickly invaded the world of commerce. When you could time your actions with those of a remote trading partner, new styles of just-in-time commerce could emerge.

“Merchants desperately needed to time certain things,” says Nigel Thrift, co-author of Shaping the Day, a history of early timekeeping. “If you think about all the farms, those goods and crops around London, if they don’t get to the city at a certain time, they’re spoiled.” Meanwhile, pocket-watch-wielding conductors meant trains could begin to keep regular schedules; scientists and astronomers could conduct more precise experiments. Portable watches even made it easier for lovers to conduct illicit affairs, by arranging to meet at a preordained spot and time. (“You try conducting an affair without a sense of time,” Thrift jokes.)

And when precise time wasn’t available? Chaos ensued. In 1843, elections in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, were disputed when nobody could agree on what time the polls had closed—because the townspeople didn’t synchronize their clocks. (“It is well known that we have no exact or certain standard of time in this borough,” complained a local paper.)

Having a watch wasn’t just about keeping to the clock, though. It was a cultural marker—a performance of punctuality. Every time you pulled out your watch, conspicuously and in public, you signaled others that you were reliable.

“You were a modern person, a timekeeping person, a regular person,” says Alexis McCrossen, a professor of U.S. history at Southern Methodist University who wrote Marking Modern Times, a history of American timekeeping. A 1913 Hamilton watch ad explicitly described the device as a tool for moral improvement: “The Hamilton leads its owner to form desirable habits of promptness and precision.” Soon, the watch was a straightforward metaphor for having attained the middle class: Horatio Alger novels often showed the plucky protagonist had “arrived” when he got a watch. The technology even created a new compliment: If you were ambitious and hardworking, people called you a “stemwinder”—somebody who habitually wound his timepiece.

“Punctuality gets marked as a morally elevated thing,” notes Robert Levine, author of A Geography of Time and a social psychologist at California State University, Fresno.

But pocket watches had one problem: They were impractical when you were on the go. If you were trying to do something active—like drive a car or ride a horse—reaching into your pocket could distract you and cause disaster. So, much as today’s gym-goers put their iPods on an armband while they work out, sporting folks of the 19th century began to fashion “wristlets”—leather straps that would hold their pocket watch on their wrist while they rode on bicycles or on horseback. The 18th and 19th centuries also saw some of the first formal wristwatches—with delicate, small watch faces, worn by women as a form of jewelry.

Time became information you acquired with a quick glance. But because women were the main wearers of wristwatches, men mostly avoided the trend. They looked too effeminate.

“They were very gender divided,” Thrift notes. Even watchmakers thought the wristwatch trend was silly and hoped it would die off. One decried it as “the idiotic fashion of carrying one’s clock on the most restless part of the body.”

The tide changed during World War I. Officers began using wristwatches to coordinate the new style of attack: opening with a barrage of gunfire to stun and destabilize the enemy, followed immediately by an onrush of soldiers.

“You’d want the soldiers to be alert to the fact that the guns were about to stop, and be ready to spring,” says David Boettcher, a British horologist who has researched wartime watch-wearing. This required precise timing, and officers fumbling around in the dark for a pocket watch wouldn’t do. To make the wristwatches easily legible in battle, watchmakers fashioned them with large, round faces that had prominent dark numbers set off by a white porcelain backing and coated in radium that glowed brilliantly in the dark.

Suddenly, wristwatches seemed manly.

"It was the iPhone of its day, it was leading-edge technology,” Boettcher notes. And like many forms of hot new tech, it spread virally. “You get loads of boys out on military maneuvers, and one’s got on his watch that ticks and glows, and so everybody wants one.” Millions of soldiers went home having developed a wristwatch-wearing habit. The numbers tell the tale: In 1920 wristwatches were only 15 percent of all watches made in America, but by 1935 they soared to 85 percent of the watches. (Even today, men’s wristwatches are ostentatiously large—and often sold in ads boasting how jet-fighter pilots use them. “It’s almost to say, ‘I’m not a piece of jewelry—I’m a piece of technology,’” as McCrossen jokes.)

By mid-century, the exploding world of white-collar work presumed that its employees would—more often than not—have a wristwatch. Students received them as gifts upon graduation. Glanceability was precious in the highly coordinated world of office meetings. Craning your neck to look at the wall clock could risk offending a superior; a quick glance at your wrist wouldn’t. “There are all sorts of ways you can glance at your watch without anyone knowing, and it’s instantaneous,” McCrossen notes.

By the 1980s, the wristwatch had become, as York University humanities professor Douglas Freake dubs it, “perhaps the most important cybernetic device in contemporary industrialized societies.” We were cyborgs of time. And slaves, too, as critics pointed out. Wristwatches may have made us more efficient, but as humanists had long fretted, perhaps total efficiency is a creepy goal for everyday life.

These days, of course, glanceable time is no longer only on our wrists. It has evaporated into the world around us. Clocks are everywhere: on computer screens, phones, coffeemakers and microwave ovens. Nobody needs to wear a wristwatch to tell time anymore. It has transformed into pure metaphor, nothing but a signal.

But if the evolution of the wristwatch offers any clues, the journey of the wearable computer is likely to be tumultuous. As with early watches, the companies selling these odd new devices make appeals to one’s morality. Google claims its head-mounted Glass helps you “get technology out of the way,” while Pebble says a glance at the wrist is less rude than having to “pull your phone out in the middle of the meeting.”

Whatever one thinks of those assertions, it’s certain that wearables would tweak our orientation to the world around us. Much as wristwatch wearers developed a heightened sense of time, we’d develop a heightened sense of “what’s going on”—news of the day, invisible details of our health, the thoughts of a loved one. The watch allowed new feats of time coordination; wearables would increase social coordination.

***

And so we’d probably see a cultural echo, too. Those who thrive off social contact will love a wearable, but those already overwhelmed by Facebook and texting will find it tears at their solitude and sense of self. Both will be, in part, right. The device may be new, but those hopes and fears are old.

“Stains Of Deceitfulness”: Inside The US Government’s War On Tech Support Scammers

 

Aurich Lawson / PCCare247

Sitting in front of her PC, the phone in her hand connected to a tech support company half a world away, Sheryl Novick was about to get scammed.

The company she had reached, PCCare247, was based in India but had built a lucrative business advertising over the Internet to Americans, encouraging them to call for tech support. After glimpsing something odd on her computer, Novick did so.

“I saw some sort of pop-up and I don’t know if there’s a problem,” she told a PCCare247 tech named Yakeen. He offered to check the “management part” of her computer for possible problems.

“This is very, very important part of the computer and it work like the human brain, all the major decision, all the action, all the result is taken by this management part,” Yakeen said in a strong accent relayed over a poor-quality phone line that sometimes made comprehension difficult. All he needed to run his test was total control of Novick's Windows computer.

She agreed, downloading and installing a remote access tool. When it was in place, Yakeen reached out through the Internet, took control of Novick’s mouse cursor, and opened a program called Event Viewer. The scam was about to begin.

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The PCCare247 cricket team after a 2012 match.

PCCare247

Event Viewer is a built-in Windows tool designed to make visible the millions of mostly unimportant background activities running beneath the hood of a modern computer. Few mainstream computer users have even heard of it, much less run Event Viewer of their own volition—which explains why few mainstream users would know that, in a system as complex as Windows, Event Viewer will always display errors, most of them trivial. Thus, should someone want to convince mainstream users that their computers are riddled with problems, Event Viewer is a reliable combination of the inscrutable and the terrifying.

Yakeen showed Novick a series of bright red warning messages in her Event Viewer logs.

“It has 30 errors,” he told her, while a separate subsection of Event Viewer showed 43 more. Based on these 73 problems, Yakeen formulated a quick and utterly improbable diagnosis for Novick’s problems.

“Your computer is hacked by someone,” he said. “They are using your name and your ID, your computer to do some cyber fraud and cyber terrorism.”

Leaving no time for Novick to raise questions about how obscure Windows errors might indicate the presence of terrorist hackers, Yakeen opened a command prompt on Novick’s machine and ran a text-based tool called “netstat.” Netstat shows all of a computer’s network connections, both inbound and outgoing, and in this case it showed a single established link—one that pointed outside the US.

“I’m 100 percent sure and I strongly believe that you have some hacking issue working in your computer,” Yakeen said as he pointed this out to Novick. “Your computer is being hacked by someone. And they are doing some criminal activity using your name, your computer, your computer address.”

This was a brazen lie; forensic examination would later conclude that the single connection displayed by netstat was in fact the remote access tool that Yakeen was using at that moment to control Novick’s machine.

To complete his examination, Yakeen then told Novick that he would scan her computer for viruses. To do so, he ran a command called “tree.” Filenames immediately filled the screen, scrolling away in a blur as hundreds of new names took their place. When the list stopped moving, the command prompt read:

C:\509 virus found

“Now can you see the number of virus found in your computer?” Yakeen asked.

“509 viruses?” Novick asked.

“Yeah, 509 virus working your computer. And they are—the hacker are directing your information and your—it might be possible your e-mail account and your Facebook account is also hacked by the hacker because hacker are using your name and your password. All the data, photographs, radio, and your e-mail are already hacked by the hackers, so we have tried to recover all the data from the hackers and install an anti-hacking tool in your computer, okay?”

The situation sounded bad—unless you knew that the tree command used by Yakeen has nothing to do with viruses. It merely lists all files within a directory, showing them in a hierarchical “tree” arrangement of folders, subfolders, and files. The scrolling list had been entirely ordinary files on Novick’s machine; it had stopped only because Yakeen had canceled its run. As for the words “509 virus found”—Yakeen had simply typed them out himself at the command prompt, hoping that Novick would believe them to be output from the “virus scanner.”

PCCare247 said it was ready to "despise every technical folly ready to play mess with the lives of naïve techno greenhorns."

Yakeen didn’t give Novick much time to think about the diagnosis; with the problem identified, he barreled into his sales pitch for a 45-minute cleaning of her computer. By the end of this process, Yakeen promised that he could “remove all the hackers, remove all the errors and 509 virus from the computer and recover all the data, okay?”

All Novick needed was $400.

“Is there any way to do it cheaper?” she asked.

“Cheaper?” said Yakeen. “Okay, please hold the line because I am just discussing this issue with my accounts department and definitely I will give you a discount, okay?”

After a brief pause, the “accounts department” reduced the price to $360 and threw in three years of future tech support.

“$360 is a lot,” Novick responded, still haggling. “Is there any way you could do it for like $300?”

Yakeen transferred her to the floor “accounts manager,” who offered a $300 plan that included two years of future tech support. Novick agreed and provided her credit card. She thanked PCCare247 for helping her out.

“That’s our pleasure, ma’am, and because, you know, PCCare247 just focuses on the customer satisfaction,” a company rep told her when the work was done. “Our main aim is to satisfy the customer needs, right?”

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The PCCare247 team in the office around Christmas.

PCCare247

What Yakeen didn’t know was that Novick was actually a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigator who had been assigned to global “tech support scams.” She had recorded the entire encounter, which had been conducted using a clean PC located within an FTC lab.

After the call, the FTC sent Civil Investigative Demands—requests for information—to just about every US company that had done any sort of business with PCCare247: banks, credit card processors, domain registrars, telephone companies, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. In October 2012, after months of work, agency lawyers had finally assembled their case into a 15-page complaint against PCCare247 and its owner, Vikas Agrawal (sometimes spelled Agarwal).

“The Defendants operate a massive scheme that tricks consumers into spending approximately $139-$360 to fix non-existent problems with their computers,” the complaint alleged.

Those fees added up to serious revenue for PCCare247. In just one year, from October 2010 to September 2011, $4 million had been deposited in the two main PCCare247 bank accounts—and that was just from US residents.

The company used this cash to build more business, spending more than $1 million through at least seven separate advertising accounts with Google. The money bought “sponsored search results” that appeared when users searched for terms, including “virus removal.”

But PCCare247 went further, taking out ads on search terms like “mcafee phone number usa,” “norton customer service,” and “dell number for help.” The ads themselves said things like “McAfee Support - Call +1-855-[redacted US phone number]” and pointed to domains like mcafee-support.pccare247.com. As numerous complaints attest, less savvy computer users searching the Internet for specific tech support phone numbers would see PCCare247’s number near the top of their screens and assume that this was an official line.

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A sample PCCare247 ad.

FTC

The tactic reached huge numbers of people. One PCCare247 ad account with Google produced 71.7 million impressions; another generated 12.4 million more. According to records obtained by the FTC, these combined campaigns generated 1.5 million clicks—a 1.8 percent clickthrough rate. Rather than cold-calling people—a preferred tactic of many tech support scammers—PCCare247 instead placed its ads and waited for the calls for help to roll in. The calls were forwarded to PCCare247’s operations in India, where people like Yakeen took over. Some may well have offered legitimate tech support, but even PCCare247 admits that not all did.

Not surprisingly, this business model produced complaints. In New York, the state in which PCCare247 lists its US headquarters (in a virtual office), the Better Business Bureau gave the company an "F" after receiving 27 complaints.

A typical complaint runs like this: a woman begins having computer issues late one night. She Googles “Norton” and, instead of calling Norton tech support, ends up dialing a PCCare247-linked company. The technician “told her that her computer was corrupted and being hacked and she had security issues and if it spread to other computers he would have to notify the FBI.” The woman wakes her husband, who is agitated that she already provided her credit card number. He calls PCCare247 to demand they not charge his card but the tech “kept talking about hackers and wouldn’t shut up.” PCCare247 then charges the couple three times at $150 each. When the man calls back later, enraged at the charges, the company promises a refund and asks him “not to contact the State Police or anyone else.”

Over at the FTC, 300 complaints poured in to the agency’s Sentinel database. Reading through them serves as a reminder that most mainstream users have absolutely no idea how their computers work and that they will in fact seek out technical support when their speakers are on mute or when they can’t eject a CD from the drive.

As one senior citizen, who thought he was calling Dell tech support, recounted: “described my problem to the man (heavy Indian accent) and he told me he needed to access my computer to see what the problem was. He took me to the site where he could access my computer using a specific code. After accessing my Dell computer, he said Oh My God. Your computer has been infected by dozens of viruses. There is a hacker in your computer accessing all your personal and banking information right now… I was scared at that time. I do a lot of shopping on the computer and have my banking and retirement information on it.”

The companies processing financial transactions for PCCare247 were also unhappy with the constant stream of chargebacks and complaints. Vikas Agrawal had created many separate PayPal accounts, for instance, but at least three of them had been frozen and set to “Limited-High” status due to security concerns.

PCCare247 faced a constant battle to accept payments, especially credit cards. The company eventually went to a US resident named Navin Pasari, who applied for at least 13 merchant accounts—many of which were declined upfront or cancelled later due to excessive chargebacks.

Given this history, it wasn’t difficult for the FTC to obtain a temporary restraining order (TRO) against PCCare247, an order that made it all but impossible to do business in the US. Most of the company’s cash had already been transferred to Indian banks (only $1,700 was left in US accounts), where it would prove hard to reach, but the TRO did shut down the company’s domain name, local phone numbers, and credit card processing. New money would not be flowing.

“The FTC litigation has effectively shut down the [PCCare247] business,” the company complained to the federal judge overseeing its case. It admitted to “some improper conduct” but attributed this only to “some overzealous sales personnel [who] crossed the line” and said that “they will be dismissed or retrained.”

In PCCare247’s view, it was simply a third-party tech support company that advertised on Google—and what was wrong with that? In a separate declaration, Vikas Agrawal added, “PCCare247 wants to be a good corporate citizen.”

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PCCare247 employees presenting flowers to Vikas Agrawal on his birthday.

PCCare247

§

The gospel truth

PCCare247 wasn't some anonymous boiler room operation. The company employed 115 people at its height and had 8,000 square feet of modern office space in DLF Cybercity, a development to the southwest of New Delhi that also houses the Indian branches of companies like IBM, Accenture, and Oracle.

PCCare247 also had a visible presence on social media, at one point sharing on Facebook photographs of staffers celebrating Diwali, playing cricket, and even delivering a birthday cake to Agrawal. YouTube videos show young staffers wandering around modern cubicles on Christmas as they play the "Treasure Hunt Game."

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Agrawal's birthday cake.

PCCare247

The company’s past LinkedIn profile rather enthusiastically described the company as a “vogue dispenser in online technical support” that would “despise every technical folly ready to play mess with the lives of naïve techno greenhorns.” The company had also “won over the nitty-gritty of every technical impediment so that scalable solutions can be dished out without any crunches.”

Agrawal took pains to address at least some of the online complaints about his company. He repeatedly offered refunds to those who complained, and he had staffers respond publicly to complaints, including at the New York BBB. He even created a strange blog devoted to debunking the (many) online complaints about PCCare247 in some truly delicious prose. Agrawal sensed a conspiracy, he said, to harm his entirely legitimate business.

“If you notice all these different rip-off complaints of PCCare247 carefully,” one entry read, “you will find that each of these faultfinders is alien, and the allegations they put on us are too baseless. To stop these grapevines from spreading, there’s little we can do about it, as they are the part of the cons of the Internet world... The whole rip-off community needs to pull up its socks and has to check these reports for their authenticity so as to remove the stains of deceitfulness that has been marked on online technical support providers as a whole.”

Indeed, Agrawal insisted that his company was a “good Samaritan” that had “stepped into this domain to serve computer users community for long term, so there is no point it is involved in doing any hanky-panky.” Despite the complaints, the company “believes in the gospel truth that at the end one who is righteous, triumphs.”

Just another day at the office.

PCCare247

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However, PCCare247 did not triumph; it came crashing down. On October 3, 2012, FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz publicly announced his agency's crackdown on tech support scams, including the complaint against PCCare247. The next day, an Indian blog called Techgoss published an account from a local tipster who worked only minutes away from the PCCare247 offices.

"Their Operational Site has now completely been shutdown by Police," the source reported. "I went there today and I could see approximately 5-10 Policemen standing outside stopping the employees from going in."

The tech “kept talking about hackers and wouldn’t shut up."

In December 2012, the Times of India reported that 50 PCCare247 employees held a protest in front of Agrawal’s home, claiming that “they had not received their salaries for the past three months.” Other employees gathered at the main offices to demand their pay. The local police arrived to mediate, and the protests ended when “company officials gave a written assurance that they would provide the salaries to employees soon.”

In March 2013, Agrawal rather plaintively wrote a letter to the FTC in which he complained that “all our employees have left us” and that PCCare247 could not “afford to keep a technician” anymore since payment processors in the US were now holding back $120,000 in payments. Agrawal said that he was personally providing support to those who could reach him through e-mail. (Agrawal did not respond to requests for comment.)

“We’re a legitimate company,” he concluded. “While looking for bad apples, a genuine company has been punished for no fault of its. [sic]”

Was this true? I reached out to former PCCare247 employees. Only one was willing to speak about his experience, but he described a culture where, in his opinion, “9 out of 10 customers were deceived and misled by the sales representatives… I never saw Mr. Agrawal trying to stop this; rather he encouraged and promoted this scam by paying instant cash to individuals who misled customers by means of false and spurious statements and cracked sales.”

The employee left PCCare247 in late September 2012, just before the FTC announced its crackdown, and he was one of those claiming non-payment for his last weeks of work.

“Mr. Vikas Agrawal should be prosecuted to the maximum extent possible under the provisions and Laws of [the] US Federal Trade Commission,” the employee told me. “Had I been in US, I would have gladly testified against him in a court of law.”

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PCCare247 staffers after a football match.

PCCare247

The wheels of justice

Since its filing, the FTC’s action against PCCare247 has moved slowly but inexorably forward.

Vikas Agrawal initially hired a US law firm to represent his company, but in January 2013 that firm withdrew after not being fully paid—despite $50,000 that the court unfroze for the purpose of paying lawyers. In addition, the law firm cited a “breakdown in communication” with its PCCare247 clients, who “have criticized counsels’ performance and disagree with counsels’ strategic and tactical advice in this litigation.” Finally, despite the many statements about wanting to be a good corporate citizen, PCCare247 never actually complied with the terms of the injunction against it.

With the lawyers gone, communication with the Indian defendants became so sporadic that a default judgment was finally entered against Agrawal in February 2014. Collecting on it may be near-impossible, but the FTC has certainly made life difficult for what was once a significant operation.

According to Colleen Robbins, a lead FTC attorney handling the case, the goal of FTC litigation isn’t simply to retrieve money. “You always hope that there’s going to be some deterrent effect,” she told me. She also noted that the FTC partnered with six other countries to bring this most recent batch of cases, making it an international effort designed to address an international problem that's increasingly important in the Internet era.

The FTC has had more direct success with defendants who actually reside in the US. Navin Pasari, the US resident used to apply for at least 13 financial services accounts on behalf of PCCare247, agreed in late 2013 to turn over the $14,369 he earned from the company. In another one of its tech support scam cases, the FTC got owner and US resident Mikael Marczak to sign a consent decree, give up his 2005 Hummer H2, and pay back whatever money was left in his accounts (it wasn't much). And the agency is going after several other companies it accuses of running similar scams.

The process can be excruciatingly slow, and most of the money gets spent or hidden before it can make its way back to either the government or to the victims, but it's at least more productive than just trolling the scammers.

Most of PCCare247's employees appear to have moved on to other jobs in the Indian IT industry. FTC lawyers continue to file tedious legal documents in the case against the company. As for Agrawal, he continues to write plaintive letters to the court, asking for more money to be released from US payment processors. His company has largely vanished from the Internet, its domain names and social media presence gone, but at least Agrawal has found ways to pass the time. His most recent tweet, from January 21, 2014, says only, "I just flew 1,896m in a totally crazy game of #JetpackJoyride."

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