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

Doesn't this happen all the time?

[Chrutil]

Or "It's like deja-vu, all over again. " as iYogi Berra would have said...

Re:Doesn't this happen all the time?

[booyoh]

I guess they weren't smarter than the average bear.

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.

Re:Will iYogi sue Avast?

[billcopc]

Not at all. That was just the "mystery customer" call to confirm the shenanigans, after several users complained about it to Avast.

After RTFA (*gasp*), my interpretation is that iYogi is pretty much attempting customer fraud, by running bogus diagnostics and selling expensive solutions the customer does not need - and dare I say, probably won't fix anything besides the fake alerts. Over here in Canada/U.S., that's a serious offense that can land you in jail. I don't know how India's criminal code relates, but even from a purely business perspective, iYogi is still defrauding its client, Avast, as they are spending their client's time and money to convince users to fall for a fake diagnostic scam. That's a very good reason to terminate the contract, and then sue the company.

Now I guess the question becomes: how hard is it to sue an Indian company into the ground ?