What happens if the company you hire to protect you against fraud and information theft is the one that helps deceive you?

McAfee is one of the two computer security companies that dominate the marketplace. The other computer security company is Norton.  The vast majority of business and personal computers have either McAfee or Norton software installed, which they expect will protect them against viruses and malicious software that can steal personal information and even financial information. The fear is for identity theft and financial theft.

On the McAfee corporate website, in the ‘About Us’ section is written:  “McAfee lives for the challenge of protecting and liberating our customers by staying ahead of the bad guys in our relentless search for safe.”

Hence the irony in McAfee being sued for using deceptive pop-up ads, one of the very threats thatMcAfee software is supposed to eliminate. The class action lawsuit charges that McAfee is tricking customers into buying third-party services through a deceptive pop-up advertisement.  The pop-up display, which looks like the rest of the McAfee website, appears after downloading McAfee software from McAfee’s website. The pop-up even thanks customers for their purchase and asks them to click a ‘Try it Now’ button which guides them to unknowingly enrol in a subscription-based service offered byArpu, Inc., a third party.

The degree to which McAfee either designed the process or allowed the process to integrate with its customer experience in itself seems to indicate that they intentionally meant to deceive consumers.  I had the opportunity to discuss one of these incidences with Dina, a MetroActive member. Dina had noticed a $4 a month fee appearing on her credit card statement with the reference “TB perfectspeed202-446-1821 DC”. When Dina googled the telephone number she traced it to a Arpu, Inc. and in the process also noticed many online posts by others who were deceived in the same way.

On April 6, 2010 a class action lawsuit was filed in the United States District Court, Northern District of California.

The accusation made in the lawsuit is that McAfee disguises the purchase as just another step in the process of downloading the McAfee software. It points out that customers are unaware that they have just transmitted their credit card or debit card information to a third party, Arpu Inc. The information transmitted is the very information they trusted with McAfee. The customers are unaware that they signed up for a service that charges an automatic renewal fee. Furthermore, that fee is hard to detect on billing statements.  In addition, in the lawsuit it is claimed that details about the terms of service are purposefully hidden in hard to read print and that customers are not able to cancel their service by calling Arpu, Inc.

If I didn’t personally know Dina, the MetroActive member who is one of the individuals that is a victim to this scheme, I would have a tough time believing it.  What makes the claims more credible is that Dina is a research doctor with many years of Canadian university education and has been published in several medical journals for her ground breaking research. If she can be deceived by this, then I figure most people can be deceived.

After this, how can we trust that McAfee won’t do something else with our information that we don’t expect?

This is the sort of corporate behaviour that motivated me to write “The Banker Who Saved His Soul”. The book addresses these sorts of situations, their impact on individuals and our society and how to deal with them effectively.