A popular scam for years is "tech" support were PC users are convinced they have a non-existent problem with their computers and required to hand over hundreds of dollars for useless remote diagnostic and cleanup services.

"I'll just [tap, tap, runs a ping command] see if you have any antivirus protection. See, all the requests timed out. That is why your computer is working so slow."

Those are the words of a "technician" trying to convince a Mac user to hand over some cash.

Victims are often encouraged to sign up to multi-year support contract costing hundreds of dollars for worthless services.

one of the culprits is Speak Support, which offers “Mac® Techical Support” (sic). This according to Malwarebytes. They report that the firm is misusing the ping command to convince a victim that he or she has no protective software installed.

It achieves this by going to a site called protection.com that doesn’t respond to the ping utility.

Jerome Segura of Malwarebytes has put together a blog post explaining how the Mac support scam works in greater depth here.

If you want to know how to deal with these scams, you can find that here.