Avast Drops iYogi Support Over Pushy Scare Tactics

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.'"

Comments

Re:Will iYogi sue Avast?

[Arker]

No, it's not just based on this one incident.

Let me explain that where I work I speak fairly often with customers who have dealt with these guys. As a result I did a little research a few weeks back. You can do the same, use the google.

Anyhow there's a quite long-running and very interesting thread on the Avast user forums about these guys. It has both some very good and some very bad experiences, which matches what I have heard personally. At any rate it's been an ongoing issue for some time and this appears to be the last straw - it certainly wasnt the first case like this though.

Hand in glove

[sstamps]

I uninstalled the Avast trial a couple months ago with extreme prejudice as the piece of shite CONSTANTLY interrupted everything I was doing every goddamned hour to tell me that the trial was going to expire in a couple WEEKS. It would minimize other apps (including games, full-screen videos, etc) so its little warning box could be seen. Yes, I turned off every notification option I could find in it, and it STILL harassed me, so into the refuse pile it went. Yet another idiot company I will never do business with ever again.

So, it comes as no surprise to me that they would hire such an aggressive "support" company. The glove fits the hand.

They both need to die in a fire and then rot in hell together.

Re:Hand in glove

[Baloroth]

Uhh, dude, Avast is free for non-commercial use. All you have to do is register it once a year, which takes about ~30 seconds. I've used it for ~2 years now. And you can set it so the box doesn't pop-up when you have a full-screen app running (don't recall how, I haven't touched the settings on it in over a year now).

I've also found it to be the most lightweight unobtrusive AV out there. I tried Avira once: never again. Practically hosed my friend's system and ran like shit on my netbook (that one did pop-up constant notifications, and I mean CONSTANT). By contrast, Avast isn't even noticeable on the netbook at all (original generation 1.6ghz, I was impressed), and I have never once seen it interrupt a full-screen program in my two years of using it. In case you cannot tell, I recommend it. Only issue I've had is that it wants to sandbox most Steam games when they first run (but when set to open them normally and not ask again, it works just fine).

Re:Hand in glove

[Orphaze]

MS Security Essentials is licensed for home use only.

That is wholly incorrect, and has been for some time now. From http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/products/security-essentials: Microsoft Security Essentials is available for small businesses with up to 10 PCs.