There are a lot of videos on youtube such as scambaiter which dive into the world of scam call centers in India and the common theme among them is that during the day, they all operate as legitimate call centers for US companies and then after closing, the scam people come and use the exact same office building or even computers to try to scam people. It's so easy for the Indian employees there who have very little if any accountability to American privacy laws to look at the customers' information and jot down their Federal Tax ID number, address, name of the owner, etc. and use that information when they switch to being scammers that night.

In my case, I continued to get the scam emails about renewing to Quickbooks Desktop 2023 right up till a month after my payroll had already expired and support had ended for my Quickbooks 2020. Then magically, the scam emails stopped so to me, this confirms that it was the Intuit employees (or likely scammer 3rd parties Intuit hires) are themselves the scammers because they knew exactly what product I was using and when it was going to expire. To me it's insane to use Quickbooks online when Intuit hires those kind of people because then they can get the keys to the entire kingdom and completely exploit your business's good name.  This past year we also had a case where someone  had filed for unemployment on behalf of our business's owner. We immediately reported it to the state and stopped it but it wouldn't surprise me if Intuit's employees were involved in that as well.  

If anybody is reading this and thinking about doing manual payroll and stopping their Quickbooks subscription, it's really not hard. I've saved about $1400 by not getting Quickbooks Desktop 2023 and subscribing to payroll and don't miss a thing. Just gotta be a little more careful about typing in the numbers instead of them being generated.