Avast Drops iYogi Support Over Pushy Scare Tactics 100
An anonymous reader writes "Antivirus maker Avast is suspending its relationship with iYogi, a company it has relied upon for the past two years to provide live customer support for its products. The move comes just one day after an investigation into iYogi showed the company was using the relationship to push expensive and unnecessary support contracts onto Avast users. In a blog post, Avast's CEO wrote, 'We had initial reports of this behavior a few weeks ago and met with iYogi's senior executives to ensure the behavior was being corrected. Thus, we were shocked to find out about Mr. Krebs' experience. As a consequence, we have removed the iYogi support service from our website and shortly it will be removed from our products.'"
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Will iYogi sue Avast? (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm a spam cop over at reddit.com & we chased iyogi off the site LONG ago, they're spam, pure & simple, & we found links between iyogi & these "support staff" that phone you AT HOME to advise you your system is compromised
Firsthand account (Score:4, Interesting)
I dealt with these guys once, and I definitely understand what they mean by 'aggressive tactics.' I bought a new Linksys router several months back and was having trouble getting the wi-fi working, so I looked on Google for the Linksys support and the iYogi site was the first thing to pop up. Since I couldn't find a support number to call at Linksys's website I didn't really have any choice but to call the one number I could find.
So I describe the problem to the guy and he has me download some java program to screen-share with me, then has me run through the various troubleshooting steps... So far no real problems. But when he couldn't find a solvable issue (ie: hardware problem) he asked me to open regedit and open a couple random keys, then told me my registry was corrupt but they could sell me their service which would fix my registry so the router would work.
I'm decent enough at fixing computers myself to know that was a load of crap, but Average Joe Consumer would be pretty far in the dark. Not only was my registry fine, but the router was defective, so their service would have been completely worthless.