I decided to check this morning to see if a particular charge had cleared. It hadn’t, but I was struck curious by a charge I never authorized from a company which I had not purchased a good or service from since 2004. Now $84.41 is not a great deal of money in the larger scheme of things in life but I am a big believer in only paying for what one actually purchases. I'm odd that way.
In 2003, I bought a Dell computer which came with a year’s subscription to McAfee Virus/Firewall protection etc. I renewed the subscription in 2004 but I deliberately chose not to renew the subscription in 2005. End of story or so I thought. Knowing what I know today - I wish I had paid more attention to my paper statements in the old paper snail mail days. By late August 2006, the original hard drive of my computer fried and I bought a replacement drive which I promptly uploaded a non-McAfee virus/firewall software protection.
So imagine my surprise this morning when I was reading my credit card bill and discovered McAfee had billed me for a renewal for my “virus/firewall protection” software which I had declined to renew since 2005. I contacted the company and was told it had something to do with the ‘user terms & conditions agreement’ which states the company has the right to automatically charge a former customer’s credit card for automatic subscription renewals of virus protection software without receiving expressed instructions from the customer and without specifically supplying the good or service to the consumer. The Old Negative Option Billing Scheme.
And as far as I can tell, the real jaw clincher for their ‘user terms and conditions’ agreement is that McAfee reserves the right to continuously renew a passive “automatic” subscription for its product/service. Buy a McAfee product in 2004 and there is no suspension of charges until literally your credit card number expires.
I immediately attempted to contact McAfee via their website. Whatever you do – don’t attempt to maneuver around their website - where most customer service requests link to a dead end – or at least it did for me. Of course, it didn’t help that I haven’t a clue as to what software I purchased from McAfee originally….it was quite a long time ago. Eventually, I was able to get a McAfee customer service agent using the 800 number that was supplied on my credit card statement.
I got to listen to a customer service representative sing me a long song and dance about the user “terms & conditions of use agreement” which may wash in Texas or California but this is Canada; and there are very particular laws concerning negative option billing. Nor would it be to McAfee’s advantage to end up litigating in a Canadian courtroom and attempt to defend their practice of negative option billing without proof of goods or services delivered to me since 2004. After much hemming and hawing, the customer service agent agreed to reverse the charges of 2007 within 3-5 business days.
Will they? I have absolutely no idea which is why I also contacted my credit card company and immediately reported the very dodgy charge from McAfee. The credit card company immediately put the amount in dispute and removed it from my credit card statement where it will not accrue any interest or penalty charges. The onus is now on McAfee to prove positive proof that I requested the good and/or service charged and received the good or service charge in order to be reimbursed from the credit card company.
In my opinion, negative option billing is a despicable business practice which no alleged ethical business organization can afford to indulge in and still be thought of as anything better than your common two-bit-cyber conmen. I may be out of pocket for the years 2005 and 2006; and I accept that as the price to be paid for my initial carelessness. But I will be damned if I with let McAfee continue to fleece me under the terms of their user agreement to infinity and beyond.
So here’s my best attempt at a little consumer advocacy:
1. Refuse to use any McAfee product until the company discontinues the practice of using negative option billing.
2. Religiously check your credit card statements item by item.
3. Immediately report any charges to your credit card company which were not explicitly and expressly authorized by you - the card holder.
5 comments:
I don't use McAfee but it's more because of their history of screwing up and killing inboxes than negative option billing - must add that to the list!
We stopped using McAfee at work a couple of years ago and went with trend micro, which has a free online check as well. I have a license for one home pc because I use it for work as well as my laptop. For my other pc's I use the free Avast which is quite good as well as AVG internet security free version, both are adequate and the AVG seems to be the better of the two.
For the enterprise, McAfee's antivirus management products like ePolicy Orchestrator are without peer. Paired with VirusScan Enterprise it adds up to a potent and easily managed AV and patch compliance system. Regrettably these great tools are going to be out of reach for the average home user, but the advantage is that they are not negative-option billed.
I had no idea that's how McAfee handled the home user stuff. Ridiculous. I don't blame you for ditching them, but I couldn't do likewise -- the corp network network depends on some of those enterprise products for protection. And I depend on them at home to help maintain technical proficiency.
For the home user I hear that Eset's NOD32 is the fastest virus scanner available, with the best detection rates. And a very very reasonable price point, too. I don't see a lot of utility for an integrated firewall/AV product unless you don't have a cable/DSL router between you and the ISP's modem.
If you do have a cable/DSL router then that will soak up many of the most common attacks and there's not much call for another firewall on top of WinXP SP2's built-in firewall. There's also a few steps you can take to make the router more secure, and help it mitigate the impact even if you do get infected. E-mail me if you want to know more as I don't want to eat up all your comment space.
I have been using trend micro as well and have had no problems. I felt McAfee slowed my system down considerbly.
I don't bother with the anti-virus or the XP firewall, they cause nothing but problems in my experience. Most routers have a good enough built in firewall that is up to snuff enough for the job. On my to-do list is take one of my older boxes and fill it with network cards and configure it as a rock solid Linux firewall, and run my wireless router behind it (it also runs on linux)
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