Recently there have been a number of community members receiving private messages from users who are pretending to be QuickBooks support or authorized third party support services. These messages are all from malicious actors in the Community who are attempting to deceive users into calling their fake support lines.
Due to the nature of private messages, we have no visibility into who is sending them or what is being sent. And we only became aware of the messages after users notified us using the "Report Inappropriate Content" feature.
We have banned the users who were sending these messages, however, we because of the fact that we have no way of monitoring these messages to keep the Community safe, we feel that the safest course of action is to disable private messages completely. Looking at the historical data on private messages, we can see that it is not a feature that is heavily used at all, so we believe this will not impact most users.
As a reminder, if you see any content that seems suspicious whether in private messages or in the community itself, you can click on the 3 vertical dots menu and click on "Report Inappropriate Content" to notify us.