SCAM! : TechSolutions4u

Honestly, I do not know if this company truly is a scammer, but based on my experience with them and the fact that I have been advised by someone from Action Fraud (the UK's national fraud reporting service) to report them. I would advise everyone to NOT use this company! ( www.techsolutions4u.co.uk )

Please read on for my family's personal experience and reasons for my suspicions below.



My parents had been buying Norton Antivirus protection for the household computers for years. Around every June, we would get that dreaded notification that the protection was due to be renewed, and so we would pay out the usual £35-£45 for another year's cover. It was a painful thing to pay out for every single time, but it did its job pretty well.

One day, about a year ago, my parents told me they had come across a Microsoft service online that would cover your entire network (meaning every device within the household) for 3 years/5 years/a lifetime with services on top of that. The price for 5 years cover was around £500 - an awful lot of money, but it would save us worrying about it every year. So, my parents went ahead an paid that big fee to the company.

As it turned out, the company was actually called 'TechSolutions4u', and every time we phoned for a general check up of the laptops or to try and get a problem fixed, we would be talking to an individual with a very thick Indian accent, but with a very Western name such as 'Jack', 'Scott' or 'Melvin'. We thought this was a little strange, but knew that a lot of companies outsource their work to countries like India nowadays, so thought on it no more.

About a week or so ago, I received a notification that the Norton Antivirus was running out (which we still had from before). I ignored it as I thought we were covered by 'TechSoloutions4u', only to later have my laptop overrun with pop-ups, adverts and to repeatedly close the Internet for no reason. I can actually barely navigate on my personal laptop because of this and immediately recognised this as a computer virus.

I proceeded to phone 'TechSolutions4u' to get the problem sorted. I was told that, because of the time difference, I would be called back at a more appropriate time. They claimed that they were situated in the USA, which meant that if it was 12pm in the UK, it was 3am for them.

I thought this was weird for 2 reasons:

1. The company states that it offers 24/7 services on it's website, if this was the case then time differences would not matter to them.

2. If they are in fact situated in the USA, why does EVERY employee I have ever spoken to have a very thick Indian accent? Is it company policy to only employ recently emigrated Indians? Is it a coincidence? Or, of course, are they actually situated in India?

Still, I later got phoned back and went through the usual process of using Logmein123 as a means for the 'technician' named Melvin to gain access to the laptop. They would then do everything they usually did, which often consisted of some very technical looking tasks (de-fragging, repairing etc.) However, this time the person I was talking to told me to immediately turn on all the laptops we had in the house and proceeded to pull up black boxes filled with codes running quickly in them.

I remembered being told to do this before, when the 'technician' proceeded to tell me that we needed to buy some additional cover for an added price of around £400 to protect us from viruses. I immediately refused and we argued on the phone for another 30 minutes before he gave up. I then sent an e-mail of complaint to the company, was phoned up and apologised to.

This time around, Melvin told me that 37 hackers had been gaining access to all of the family's information through the laptops as we all use them for our online shopping and banking.
He pulled up some very convincing-looking information that even included my mother's debit card number.

He told us that we now must pay an extra £300-£800 for protection against hackers, as at the moment, we only have the Antivirus protection.

More suspicions arose for me:

1. Why weren't we told to get hacker protection initially? I inquired. He responded: "Because you didn't need it at that stage, but now hackers have hacked into your computers." I thought protection was always offered as a PRECAUTIONARY action, not a REACTIONARY one. What use is protection against hackers now if they allegedly already have all of our information?

2. The only debit card number to show up was my mother's, the exact one used to pay this company the initial £500 for cover. Coincidence? I think not. Also, ALL of the family use these laptops for online shopping/banking, so shouldn't ALL our individual banking details be on there, not just my mother's?

3.  My entire family check their bank accounts every single day or at least on a very regular basis, yet not a single penny was removed from them by a suspicious party. If hackers really had access to our funds, wouldn't they have whipped them out a long time ago?

All of this is was ticking over in my mind as Melvin  persisted and persisted that we pay another huge sum of money for protection that we had never previously heard of. It was finally at this point that we wised up and decided no more.

It seems very obvious now that we were probably scammed out of that £500 and that this entire company was an obvious fraud from the start. However, none of my family claim to know a lot about any of this, and it seems we made an honest mistake and fell for their lies.

I hope that this post will stop anyone else falling for this company, or for any similar scams. Please share, tell your friends and warn your relatives.

Companies like this will exploit people's lack of knowledge about the confusing world of technology and use it to squeeze huge sums of money out of you!