Victim Location 98027
Total money lost $3,000
Type of a scam Tech Support
A few months ago when having computer problems we were contacted by Pinnacle Tech Solutions (claiming to work with Microsoft but there is no corporate connection). For $750 they offered "lifetime technical support" for our PC, including monitoring for problems. While they apparently solved the initial problem, they did not respond to our requests for a copy of the contractual agreement for their services. Recently, they claimed we had a problem with hackers. After scanning the computer for 2 days with no resolution to this problem, they they said a "hacker had taken over our IP" on my wife’s computer and Pinnacle said we needed to purchase a physical hardware firewall from them and they convinced my wife to purchase $2,250 of Google play cards and scan the numbers for them. And they wanted her to send $750 more of Google play cards. $3,000 to install a physical firewall on a home computer ! This was a lie in and of itself, because a physical firewall is provided by the ISP (***) for the router, and a home computer on the network generally only needs a software firewall, not a hardware firewall. I stopped her from sending Pinnacle any more Google play cards, but Pinnacle refused to refund our $3,000. When I asked why, since tech security was supposedly a part of the initial contract, why they allowed hackers into our machine, instead of taking measures initially to prevent this, they had no answer. Which just leads me to believe they wanted to sell us additional exorbitantly priced solutions to basically non-existent problems. Ironically, when you visit their website, at least when using the Chrome browser, the browser says their website is "unsafe".