Antivirus Firms Short-Changing Customers

Barence writes "Two leading security firms have been accused of ripping off customers by cutting short their antivirus subscriptions. AVG and Symantec are offering their own customers discounts on subscriptions via email or pop-ups, but the new subscriptions start immediately, 'short-changing' users who had months left on their existing deal. Both Symantec and AVG owned up to the practice, and said they had no plans to change their ways, instead advising their customers to upgrade as close as possible to the end of the subscription. However, the pair actively send out emails and pop-up messages that encourage customers to upgrade immediately."

It's all a scam

[Monkeedude1212]

Honestly, I don't know what you get out of paying for these that you don't get out of free solutions.

Has anyone ever had a controlled experiment where having the full paid for version of Symantec or AVG actually provided more security than their free counterparts?

Best Buy also ripping off customers

[spun]

I bought a laptop for my wife from Best Buy less than a year ago. Normally, I would never buy from them, but this laptop was on sale, and the best bargain we found. It came with a year long subscription to the horrible, horrible Webroot anti-virus program. Less than a year later, we saw a mysterious charge for $49.95 on the credit card we had used to purchase the laptop. Turns out Best Buy had thoughtfully resubscribed us, and only charged us a small fee for the service. Of course, I had uninstalled Webroot the moment we got the laptop home.

We called the credit card company, and as soon as we said the words "best buy" they said "we'll reverse the charges, this happens ALL THE TIME." How is this not criminal fraud on Best Buy's part?

I have AVG free edition...almost definitely a scam

[Dexter Herbivore]

As the title of this post suggests, I have AVG free edition (yes, I know... it's bad). It's due to renew in 2 weeks with the new version. Amazingly, with only a short time to go on the free edition it detected a "generic trojan" for the first time (despite daily scans and relatively safe online behaviour) last week... just after the nag pop-ups started to appear. It recommended that I upgrade to the paid version. No online scan (eg. House Call from Trend Micro) seems to identify this heuristically detected "generic trojan" in my Sony-Ericcson phone management software. Convenient that it happens now, I thought. Guess who's switching to Avast? sarcasm Although maybe I should stick to this new version of Antivirus7... errrrr, I mean AVG. sarcasm/

Re:Windows - Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's the best free anti-virus [microsoft.com] I have ever used on the Windows platform. And, it works better than Norton and McAfee.

But does it work on Linux?