Accounting software QuickBooks, by Intuit, is a popular target for India-based scammers, only rivaled for top spot by the classic Microsoft tech support scams.

We’ve seen two main lures, both via Google ads: the first one is simply a website promoting online support for QuickBooks and shows a phone number, while the latter requires victims to download and install a program that will generate a popup, also showing a phone number. In both instances, that number is fraudulent.

The fake QuickBooks popup was previously described in detail by eSentire and reveals how scammers are able to hijack the software functionality by generating bogus alert messages.

We ran into an active malvertising campaign recently, indicating that this scheme is still very much alive and well. In this blog post, we review how QuickBooks users that downloaded the program from a malicious ad will be plagued with a popup generated at certain intervals, instilling fear that their data may be corrupt so that they call for assistance.