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My apologies, I should've been more clear!

The scam was that this service is actually free provided by AOL. The grandparents shouldn't have ever been charged, they just ended up finding scammers that actually knew how to fix the issue.

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I think what folks are getting at is that it might not have been an outright scam. Just a third-party company that charged for its help desk. Many folks are willing pay for services like email that they could have otherwise gotten for free. The "scam" may have been more on the part of Google which elevates paid links to the top of the search results.

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