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Scammers
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I sent a drive to DriveCrash/Ai Networks, after speaking with Lou. He told me that they would give a free estimate, and if I wrote "Rush" on the box, they would get the estimate done the same day it was received.
I got a call from Lou when they received the drive, and he told me that the drive needed to be put in a "fixture" to do the recovery, which I assumed meant a head swap. He said it was to pay for 6 hours worth of labor, which I know is well outside the reasonable limit for that job to be done. He then said that the final price would be indeterminate, and would depend on how long it took to recover the data after it was in the fixture. I told him that I would have to authorize this with my customer and get back with him.
It took 2 hours to get a response from my customer, who refused the estimate. I immediately called Lou and told him about the refusal. He then told me that they had already started the recovery, so I was going to be on the hook for the $650 anyway, which I objected to, since I hadn't authorized the recovery. He then told me that he was going to have to charge at least $150 for the labor that had been done, which I still objected to. He then told me that they had started a "destructive data recovery", and it would be unlikely that another company could recover the data if they put the drive back together for me.
I know what a destructive data recovery is. It is recreating the partition table, and formatting a monolithic partition that fills the entire drive. This is destructive only in the sense under normal circumstances, a computer won't see any data on the drive. The data is not actually destroyed. At this point I knew he was lying to me in order for me to feel like I had to pay them to do the recovery, or the data would be lost.
I ultimately got him to send me the drive back, just for shipping costs, and sent the drive to another company. The other company was able to do the recovery just fine. In fact, I asked them if a destructive recovery had been started on that drive, and they told me it hadn't. Also, they saw no evidence that the heads were swapped.
I'm not sure what Lou's position is at AI Networks, but he seems to have been there for many years. I assume he has some ownership role, otherwise he would have likely been fired long ago for lying to customers. It is apparently a normal thing for him to do, given other reviews I've seen.
Don't trust these guys.
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