This happened to us a few days ago. I was out of town and my daughter was running payroll for us when she got the messages about updating, etc. QB wouldn't move forward. She called our CPA who accessed our QB and tried everything she could to get it to update but it just wouldn't do it. She was traveling herself and instructed my daughter to call support.

So she Googled QuickBooks and a couple of relevant keywords. Up popped this support phone number and she called it. From there she got the hard sell/ scare tactics. She isn't the one who normally handles any issues in QB so didn't know if what they were telling her was right. But our employees were waiting for their paychecks and she panicked. They asked for access to our system and she granted it. As she sat there watching they flipped through screen after scrolling screen of data pointing there - see that? and this - see that? There's your problem. They told her our payroll data had reached it's maximum size limit. It needed to be repaired and compressed. And that it would take quite some time (possibly up to 3 days) for them to fix it. She'd have to sign up for a new "plan" -- which she took to mean an upgraded payroll service but I looked at everything after I returned to work, and I quickly realized was a support contract. They told her this was a one-year full support plan for $4,449.99 and included “compressing” the data when needed and would also include the monthly usage fees (which for us is roughly $30 per month). It was either this one-year plan or a higher one that would be (I think) a one-time charge of $6,879.99 PLUS a $335 per month usage fee. They made her panic, which is part of the scheme of course.

So our bank account was debited $4,449.99 and they did fix the problem (in much less time than predicted, of course) – probably by clearing the cache on our system. My daughter is pretty savvy in the ways SEO works and she (correctly) identified the problem. She found this company, Internal Accounting Services LLC, ALL OVER the web. They go into chat room, for instance, GoodReads and Adobe, even a utility services company, and make nonsense posts containing keywords that result in in Google’s algorithms moving them up to the top of the results page with just the right keywords for the issues you’re having (in fact, the keywords she entered when trying to find QuickBooks’s support phone number).

This company has a rating of F on Better Business Bureau for failure to respond to complaints. The good news, if there is any, is that our IT professional scanned our system and all the logs and he’s convinced the didn’t do any digging around in our system or download anything. They also didn’t install anything. He has since blocked our computers from their website. He said this is 100% a true SCAM (based in India) and banks, credit card companies, etc. should be looking at it that way and reimbursing the victims.

My daughter reported them to Google and to every site she found them on. She tried to report them to their domain registrar but came away with the feeling they were their domain registrar – part of the scam. If you Google their name with “complaints” or “reviews” you’ll find many, many victims.