It's more like a part of a post-sales than customer support (a cost centre).

Although in this case they may be trying to reduce the volume of people who get the police involved. If they are pleasant to deal with throughout that seems likely to diminish people's enthusiasm for demanding legal consequences for the perpetrators.

Reminds me of http://www.tau.ac.il/~algazi/mat/Goffman--Cooling.htm from pre-internet times.

Hmmm, thinks back to some of the support contracts I've been involved with (or heard about from trusted friends) with "big 4 consulting firms" or "enterprise IT partners".

Nope, doesn't check out.

It does. Regular customer support is on wage/salary, and otherwise have zero economical interest in helping people. Also, they're considered cost centre, which doesn't help.

Think of criminals doing ransomware as if it was a small startup, for which profits are strongly dependent on reputation, and where your "customer support" is actually handled by the founders themselves. They have every reason to help, because it literally keeps their business model alive.

Oh yes, of course. Without question the superior customer support is a selfish incentive. But I still find it incredibly interesting.

I agree. There has to be an MBA case study in there somewhere. As others have said, they clearly is it as a profit centre (not cost centre).