Itwerx is a service-disabled veteran-owned managed IT provider serving Seattle-area businesses, founded in 2005, and part of that work is helping clients recognize the kind of social engineering described below before it costs them anything.
The call
QuickBooks support scam calls have been around long enough to barely be worth mentioning on their own, but a newer group working this particular scam is noticeably better at it than the usual operation. After a voicemail from one of them, and after hearing from several people, including one of our own customers, who had received similar calls the same month, the callback number got a test call out of curiosity.
The people on the other end were impressively low-key: no urgency, no threats of account termination, a tone that read like a script actually lifted from a real support team. They had also gathered a meaningful amount of information about the target, much of it public but some of it the kind of thing that comes from the dark web, like older, already-expired credit card details. The one real weakness in their setup was that none of the information they had was less than a year old. In this case, some prodding got the caller to admit outright that the call was not legitimate.
The part that matters more
The more interesting result came from asking two different AI assistants who currently used the callback number the scammers had called from. OpenAI’s ChatGPT answered flatly that the number was associated with QuickBooks Support. That answer was wrong in a specific and instructive way: the only reason the number showed any association with QuickBooks at all was that other people online were asking whether it was a scam, which the assistant read as confirmation rather than as the opposite. Perplexity, asked the identical question, gave the more honest answer: that there was no specific information available about who currently used that number, based on the search results it had pulled, alongside sources tying the number to several other reported scams.
A phone number’s ownership can change, and nothing here is a claim about who uses that number today – only about what two assistants said when asked, at the time this was tested. The gap between the two answers is the actual lesson: one assistant stated a wrong conclusion with full confidence because it could not tell the difference between “associated with” and “people are asking if this is a scam,” and the other correctly reported the limits of what it actually knew. For a business trying to figure out which assistant’s answers to trust when it matters, that is a more useful data point than the scam call itself.
Itwerx Corp is a service-disabled veteran-owned small business providing IT services across Seattle, Bellevue, Everett and Snohomish County. This is the kind of thing our AI integration work deals with – talk to us about yours.
