They outsource their tech support to the lowest bidder, mostly in difficult to monitor overseas offices. I'd say the most likely scenario is that underpaid Dell employees are just using their official access to do the scams or pass the information along to outside scammers.

I received the first call after I had a hardware issue with my laptop serviced on site. The service guy was just a random contractor, so when the call happened my immediate thought was "ah, somebody like that dude just vacuumed up all the customer data." Because, you know, big companies are really great at building secure internal software when chasing the cheapest dollar. </s>

I'm confident in this being the issue as I've dealt with support on multiple Dell service tags, and the only service tag the scammers know involved having to communicate with a different department than I usually have.

OK, that makes sense.

One person in the Ars Technica comment thread says they manage a lot of these machines in an enterprise environment, so surely they would be running clean Windows without any extra crapware, ruling out this possibility.

OK, thanks. But what's "crapware" to some may be features to others. Such as the remote-management clown parade.