We’ve all been there.

You find a company that looks perfect. Their website is slick, their reviews are glowing, and their marketing makes you feel like they’ve got it all figured out. You hand over your money, expecting a flawless experience.

And then?

Disaster.

That “oceanfront suite” turns out to be a basement with a humidifier. That five-star steakhouse serves you something that looks—and tastes—like it came from a gas station. That “luxury” car rental? A 2012 Nissan Altima with a missing hubcap and a check engine light that won’t turn off.

The worst part? You saw the signs. But their marketing was just that good.

Now, imagine this happening with your IT provider.

The Day Everything Fell Apart

You walk into the office, coffee in hand, ready to tackle the day. But something feels off. The usual hum of productivity is missing. No emails are coming through. No one’s phones are ringing.

Then it hits you—every single computer is offline.

You call your IT provider. They tell you they’re on it. They start troubleshooting. Hours pass. Then days. Your cyber insurance provider gets involved. They send in an incident response team.

And then? Bad news. Lots of it.

  • There are no backups.
  • The attackers got everything.
  • You’re going to have to pay the ransom.

But it doesn’t stop there.

A few weeks later, you get a letter. Not just any letter. A legal notice.

Your company is being sued.

Your clients’ data is gone—financial records, personal information, even private healthcare data. And now they’re coming after you.

A lawsuit doesn’t start with someone knocking on your door. It starts with a letter. And if you don’t handle it right, the next step is someone does show up to serve you a subpoena.

That’s when the panic really sets in. What happened?

The MSP That Was Too Good to Be True

You did everything right. You hired an IT provider with great marketing, glowing testimonials, and a sales team that really knew how to make you feel secure.

But here’s the ugly truth: they didn’t actually do anything. And you had no way of knowing. There were no warning lights. No missing hubcaps. Security failures don’t come with flashing alerts or obvious red flags. They sit in the background, unnoticed—until the hacker shows up and makes them impossible to ignore.

Why did this happen? Your IT provider took on so many new clients with their great marketing that they never got around to properly onboarding you. They didn’t even remove some of the old vendor’s tools.

Your outdated Fortinet firewall—the one with security vulnerabilities? Still in your network.

The new firewall you paid for? Still in the box.

Your backups? They never existed.

Your security stack? Just a bunch of checked boxes on a proposal.

You weren’t paying for security. You were paying for the illusion of security.

And now? You’re paying for it again. Paying more than you ever imagined.

How to Spot an MSP That’s All Talk

I was talking to the owner of an incident response company—the people who get called in when everything goes to hell. He told me there are three major things he sees when MSPs fail their clients:

  1. No backups. Businesses think they have backups because the MSP told them they did. But when disaster strikes, there’s nothing there. No offsite storage. No recovery plan. Nothing.
  2. No security updates. MSPs leave old, vulnerable systems running because they never get around to replacing them. Old firewalls. Unpatched software. Security holes big enough to drive a truck through.
  3. No accountability. The MSP charges for security tools, but no one is checking if they’re actually installed—or even turned on.

And when companies get hit? They lose everything.

How Bad Does It Get?

This incident response team worked with a business hit by ransomware. They thought they had backups. Turns out, the last good backup was from six months ago. They lost half a year of data.

And the downtime? Three weeks.

Think about that. Three weeks of no revenue. No emails. No systems. No way to do business.

They had cyber insurance. But the payout? $50,000.

The ransom? $175,000.

And after they paid the ransom? The criminals handed over a corrupt recovery tool. The data was gone forever. Because here’s the thing—criminals don’t guarantee their decryption tools actually work. There’s no refund. No tech support. Just a gut-wrenching realization that the money is gone… and so is the data.

In total, this small business lost over $300,000.

Because they believed the marketing and never verified the work.

How to Make Sure This Never Happens to You

A good MSP doesn’t just have great testimonials. They don’t just have a friendly sales team. They prove their value with results.

If your IT provider isn’t getting regular third-party cybersecurity assessments—not just when they start working with you, but after—how do you know they’re actually securing your business?

You don’t.

And when the breach happens, and the lawsuit lands on your desk, and your cyber insurance barely covers the damages, you’ll be asking yourself the same question so many other business owners have:

How did I let this happen?

Don’t wait until it’s too late. Verify your security now. Because if your IT provider isn’t being tested, they can’t be trusted.

No one is capable of proofreading their own work. Not even the MSP that sold you on “total protection.”