• A 16-year-old intern helped Netgear catch scammers in India for $800 - Culprits would pose as Netgear employees & sell fake support packages to customers An intuitive approach to a classic issue. • Get Tom’s Hardware’s best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox. • You are now subscribed Your newsletter sign-up was successful Netgear makes some of the best routers on the market, but clearly, their attorneys needed a bit of an assist last summer when it came to protecting its customers. • Scammers pretending to be Netgear employees had been preying on vulnerable clients by selling them extended support packages that never existed. • It wasn’t until an intern stepped in that the lawyers were actually able to take meaningful action. • Every time the legal experts got close, the scammers would delete their fake websites and move on to the next, stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars in the process.
Article Summaries:
- Netgear’s legal team struggled to stop scammers who posed as company employees and sold non‑existent extended support packages to customers. In the summer of 2025, the firm hired 16‑year‑old intern Wyatt, a digital native, to infiltrate the phishing sites. Wyatt posed as a customer, lured the scammers into revealing fake invoices and account details, and helped build a case. Netgear sued the scammers, subpoenaed the sites, and traced the fraud to India, ultimately winning a federal judgment that recovered over $860,000. Wyatt earned roughly $800 for his internship work.
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