3rd PARTY HELP SCAM

Ronna Gary

I was on my Windows Quicken Classic Deluxe app and requested help. A 3rd party help pop-up ad showed up, looked legitimate and I ended up talking with a company called Internal Accounting Services in Philadelphia. I paid $700 for 2 hours of clean-up service on my account. I am filing a fraud claim with Discover. [Removed - Inaccurate/Speculation]

jacobs

I can't really help, and I'm sorry to hear about your unfortunate experience. I can offer a few quick comments for you or others who might be reading this thread…

1. There are, unfortunately, any number of companies masquerading as Quicken Support and offering help, usually for a significant fee. The "best" of them simply take your payment and that's that. The really dangerous ones are once you give them access to Quicken on your computer, they can do who0knows-what. They can install malware, such as a keystroke logger, so they'll be able to later obtain your logins and passwords to financial websites. I strongly encourage you to change as many passwords on financial sites as you can, as quickly as you can, checking for bogus transactions as you go. Also install and run an anti-virus/malware scanner if you don't have one; Malwarebytes is one that's free to perform manual scans, and it's recommended by Apple.
2. Quicken Support is free. Always. As long as you have a current subscription. Anyone asking for money can automatically be ruled out as a scammer.
3. I use Quicken Mac, so perhaps there's something different with Quicken Windows, but I'm not aware of any pop-up ads within Quicken, ever. (After all, one of the benefits of paying a subscription fee is avoiding having to deal with ads.) But you said you "requested help", and I'm wondering how you did this. If it was outside the Quicken program, such as in your web browser, then it's not anything Quicken controls.
4. I've never heard about a known "internal bug" in Quicken which allows 3rd party scammers to pop up ads within the program; do you have a link to where you read this? I'm questioning the validity of that claim. Again, if you did anything in your web browser in seeking out support, then it's nothing Quicken has control over, so calling it an "internal bug" in Quicken's software would be incorrect.
5. If you can figure out what website you went to for this support, and if it does purport to be official Quicken support, you should report it to Quicken, as they do have people who pursue trying to halt companies misrepresenting themselves as Quicken. Send an email to "spoof@quicken.com". They do spend time and money to try to make sure that the true, official Quicken Support is what comes up first (and second and third and…) in search results when you Google "quicken support".

Boatnmaniac

I'm so sorry to hear that you got scammed but that is not a Quicken issue. I have been using Quicken for 14 yrs and never once has there ever been an non-Quicken program popup….ever. You got a popup but I can assure you that it was not from Quicken. There is no Quicken "bug" regarding this. Quicken and many users do post here to never, ever seek online chat nor phone support from any website or advertisement or popup than from Quicken.com.

And never ever give your login information to anyone, including anyone who claims to be from Quicken. If you gave your login information for Quicken.com and/or any financial institution, be sure to change them immediately to protect your finances and assets.

Also, I suggest that you run an anti-virus full/deep scan on your system by whatever AV application you have installed. You might also want to consider downloading, installing and running Malwarebytes. Malwarebytes can help to identify and remove some malwares that other AV applications have difficulty with. It used to be that Malwarebytes would give you a 2 wks free trial of their complete program and that should be taken advantage of if they are still offering it.

It is good you are filing a complaint with Discover. Hopefully they will agree to reverse the charge and credit your account.

And if you ever need help with something related to Quicken, please post it in this Quicken Community or initiate a Chat or Phone call with Quicken Support at https://www.quicken.com/support/quicken-support-options/. .

Quicken Anja

Hello @Ronna Gary,

We’re sorry to hear about this experience.

We request that you please email all details you have on this to spoof@quicken.com so it can be forwarded to the proper channels and further investigated.

Thank you!

BK

@Ronna Gary

I am very sorry to hear about your experience. If you indeed clicked on Quicken Help from within the Quicken program and got redirected to a scam site, it suggests that your computer has been aggressively infected with malware or virus and it is attaching itself to, infecting and altering the behavior of various programs. Who knows what other damage it may have or can cause and therefore you should take comprehensive steps to check and cleanup your computer. Again, this assumes you used Quicken program's help. If used your browser to seek help, then that is a different story. I echo all prior comments as well.

For what it's worth, I experienced such unpredictable virus behavior with a family member's computer (not a Quicken user) where I couldn't confidently trust the cleanup methods we performed and decided to toss out the hard disk and replace it with a new one - data loss but better than the what ifs! They also lost money from some accounts unfortunately.

This is not a Quicken issue nor have I ever heard or read anything to suggest that. I hope you get refunded by your credit card company.

jacobs

I'd be interested to hear if there is a positive outcome with the credit card company. I'm not sure why they would refund the charge, since the user willingly gave their credit card information to the company for service help, and the company did spend two hours on the phone.

It's not clear from the original description whether they actually fixed the problems the user called about, or if there was any illegal activity which took place while they were connected. It's been my impression in the past that some of these companies providing Quicken support actually do provide some support, and "all" they do wrong is charge customers a high fee for services which are available for free from Quicken. I'm hoping that's the case for the poster here; losing the $700 is hugely annoying, but it's minimal in comparison to having accounts compromised and identity stolen.

Boatnmaniac

I'm not sure why they would refund the charge, since the user willingly gave their credit card information to the company for service help, and the company did spend two hours on the phone.

I agree. That's why I said "Hopefully Discover will agree to reverse the charge and credit your account." They will need to provide some evidence to Discover that the claim submitted is not simply a buyer's remorse issue or that the seller acted fraudulently, failed to deliver on what they had promised or made a mistake (like over charging what was quoted or charged the card 2X when it should have been charged 1X).

26@harrich

If they deliberately created the impression that they were affiliated with Quicken or Intuit to obtain that credit card information, then that would change things considerably. But that might be hard to prove. It is wise to find the people you do business with rather than letting them find you. If my credit card company calls me up at home, I call them back via the phone number on my card or contact them via their website. It's a small hassle for both of us, but it squeezes out bad actors. I've never had them complain.