Automatic renewal charges for Security Suite products
 

Firstly, I will be back contributing here soon - been very busy with various stuff and not much time for fora/forums.

Secondly, this is the same message as I posted on Birdforum, so sorry for the cross post, but this really hacked me off and I wanted to share my experience as a warning to others...

...watch out for automatic renewals by the reputable Security Suite companies...

It turns out that this is old news and an increasingly common practice but I only found out today. It appears that McAfee took £39.99 from my credit card to renew a subscription for a product I haven't used for nearly 2 years. And yes, they nailed me last year too, but I missed it (McAfee emails are spammed and I missed the charge on my card).

To make it hurt more, even if I wanted the product, I can get it whilst living here in the US for half the price.

Worse still, it was for one user of just the VirusScan software - you can get 3 users of the complete suite for only a few ££s more...

I am particularly careful with all online purchases and couldn't understand how it happend. Having researched it, it seems that there is no way around this automatic annual subscription at McAfee when you buy their product online. You have to call them to cancel it but they didn't clearly tell you that they are going to do it, so you don't know you have to cancel it...

I have ranted about this today on my blog, if you want to read more.

Moral of this - check your credit card statements carefully and don't trust anyone

A point I can relate to and picked up by luck. A while back I was having a bit of a beef on how much we were spending on food shopping. So I decided to trawl though the bank statements. For one week it added up to £400. I then queried this with the "Boss" who spends all the money :rolleyes:

She picked up a debit card payment to Sainsburys for £150 which did not ring true. We queried this with the bank and they said that Sainsburys had put a note against the debit saying it should of been debited 5 months 3 weeks earlier.

Many years ago we probably would of done a weekly shop of this amount. However for the past 2 years we shopped at a couple of stores and the each amount is rarely over £60.

The bank gave Sainsburys 6 weeks to prove the debit with a signed reciept or refund the money. Needless to say I got a refund.

Obviously McAfee's software isn't particularly good at detecting phishing of your bank details.

Actually, I have yet to see evidence that Mcafee's software is particularly good at anything except providing slug-like performance and all too frequent installation/uninstallation nightmares.

We see Mcafee-inflicted systems come in to have their problems sorted regularly. Removing Mcafee is the routine first step towards sorting them, and not infrequently the only thing they need is a complete uninstall of Mcafee followed by an install of an anti-virus product that actually works properly and doesn't clag the system into unusability.