Avast Kills Free Phone Support After Upselling Upset
Avast gets embarrassed by iYogi’s dodgy upselling tactics.
Anti-virus vendor Avast has been forced to kill off its free phone support service run by Indian firm iYogi, after it emerged staff had been telling fibs to upsell users to a paid-for version.
The move comes after a Krebsonsecurity.com blog uncovered dodgy practices at iYogi. Security industry investigator Brian Krebs described the company’s sales tactics as “practically indistinguishable from those employed by peddlers of fake anti-virus software or ‘scareware’.”
Bye-bye iYogi?
Not only did iYogi ask Krebs to upgrade his support package, but also asked him to upgrade to paid-for Avast anti-virus software.
After learning of the discrepancies, Avast spoke to iYogi before choosing to close the support service. However, the door has been left open for a re-launch.
“iYogi service representatives appear to have attempted to increase sales of iYogi’s premium support packages by representing that user computers had issues that they did not have,” said Vince Steckler, CEO of Avast, in a blog post.
“We had initial reports of this behaviour a few weeks ago and met with iYogi’s senior executives to ensure the behaviour 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.
“We believe that this type of service, when performed in a correct manner, provides immense value to users. As such, over the next weeks, we will work with iYogi to determine whether the service can be re-launched.”
Those users who feel they have been duped into buying the premium support service can get a refund, Steckler added.
Real rogue-antivirus pushers, meanwhile, have been carrying out a campaign taking advantage of flaws in the WordPress CMS. Websense found code had been injected into more than 200,000 web pages on nearly 30,000 websites, pointing people towards pages flogging malicious kit. Even the most up-to-date version of WordPress has been exploited, Websense said earlier this week.
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