The website of the American consumer organisation Consumer Affairs is flooded with complaints of consumers about paid antivirus software and the helpdesk of antivirus companies. The complaints mainly target Symantec and McAfee.
Consumers mainly complain about recurring subscriptions, the inability of properly detecting malware and the helpdesk for the technical questions. An users reports about an incident where the helpdesk wanted to charge him $155 before the antivirus software could be installed, while another user complains the helpdesk wanted to charge him $300 for removing a virus.
The reports were discovered by the website Democrat Gazette which also notes that some reports might be fake, or that users called phone numbers that belong to scammers. However the site mentions that some users report to have double checked the number on the website of the antivirus numbers and an editor of the Democrat Gazette also sat along someone who called an antivirus helpdesk.
He writes about that, "We were present when this happened. McAfee wanted to charge our friend a few hundred dollars to clean out a virus that the software should have removed automatically."
Of the 415 reviews, Symantec scores a mere 1.5 stars out of 5, McAfee is even worse with 1 star out of 475 reviews.
