Complaint Review: GuruAid

GuruAid Customer Service scam

I don't know anything about Windows computers. I called McAfee when their anti-virus software was unable to install in my computer. After an hour on the phone with their call center (staffed by South Asians), they were unable to figure out why. They said they needed to schedule a 'higher level' technician to call back in 24 hours.

A South Asian technician called back and spent 4 hours in a 'remote access' session with the computer trying to fix the problem. She ended the session by saying that I had to contact the manufacturer of the computer to solve the problem, whatever that means. It turns out she didn't work for McAfee.

Further phone calls to McAfee were made, and they informed me that I would need to contact the software developers that made AVG software, because their software was preventing the McAfee anti-virus software from installing. This turned out to be untrue according to the technician who fixed the problem later.

I contacted GuruAid, as a search engine query listed them as the top hit in my 'AVG' search. They did a remote session and after about an hour I was switched to a 'supervisor' who told me that the computer was infected and did I want to pay $120 for a one-time fix, $179.99 for a year's service, or $300 for two years service? I decided on a year's service, and gave them my credit card info and permission to charge me.

Four hours later, technicians were still working on the problem. I wrote to them during the ongoing chat session that I was going away from the computer, and gave them my phone number so they could call me if they needed anything from me. After a few more hours I got a phone call.

It was a South Asian male voice on the phone, and he was alarmed. "Your computer is highly infected, it's sending out signals that it is in trouble" said the man. He said he worked for "the people who guarantee your computer's software", and when I disbelievingly asked him how long the warranty on my 'computer's software' was, he said ten years. He refused to say how he got my phone number, and said he worked for a company called IT solutions. I hung up on him.

He called back again after a few minutes and convinced me to do a few things with the keyboard, pressing 'R' and the 'Windows Flag' key together and typing some commands into a box. These results he described to me as evidence that more than a dozen hackers had taken control of my machine. He had me type in other text and showed me the 'Registry' which he told me had more than a thousand infected items. He said that they were replicating themselves. Then he put me on hold so I could speak to his supervisor. According to the local technician who fixed the computer later, this was all nonsense. But it scared me.

Well, his supervisor said that as the company that 'runs the operating system' on my computer he was very concerned, and that it would cost $208 to fix the operating system on my computer. I asked this if this was additional to the $179.99 that I was being charged by GuruAid. He didn't know anything about GuruAid. I told him that they are the ones that gave him my phone number. I ended the chat session with GuruAid. I ended the chat session with McAfee (which the GuruAid technician had initiated). I hung up the phone, called VISA and notified them I'd like to cancel the charge. They said that while the charge was pending, I had to contact GuruAid directly and have them remove the charge. The toll free number that VISA gave me for GuruAid went directly to an answering machine. I shut down the computer and called a local technician, who came over and fixed the problems and cleaned up the machine. There were no 'hackers inside the machine'. When he ran the McAfee virus scan, it did not detect any viruses.

I'll be calling VISA when the charge from GuruAid posts, and canceling it.

Here's the takeaway: McAfee pays South Asian call centers to provide incompetent customer service. These call centers run a scam where instead of fixing simple problems (that a local technician I hired after this experience fixed in an hour)  they refer unsatisfied McAfee customers to other incompetent (or criminal?) companies staffed by South Asians that tell them that their computers have big problems, scaring them, and then ripping these McAfee customers off by charging them for unnecessary service they cannot even provide if they wanted to. In my case they tried to cheat me and get money from me twice! All because McAfee has made a business decision - it doesn't care about retail customers, has paid an incompetent call center to represent the company and is uninterested in regulating their sub contractors based outside of the USA.