McAfee in court over misleading pop-up adverts, unwanted purchases

Filed under: Security, Windows

Advertising makes the Internet go round, but it's also become a tremendous problem. Between unsavory malware peddlers injecting their nefarious scripts into unsuspecting sites and misleading software ads tricking people into installing useless registry and driver tools, it's no wonder ad blocking has become so commonplace.

And now McAfee, longtime developers of security-related software, are being sued in a California court for misleading pop-up adverts that led to unwanted charges on the credit cards of two women. After buying products from the McAfee website, both were shown "recommendation" pop-ups provided by one-click purchase company Arpu.

According to their complaint, "The pop-up contains no obvious visual cues or conspicuous text indicating that it is an advertisement for another product, or that clicking on 'Try it Now' will lead not to the delivery of the McAfee product but rather to the purchase of a completely different product. Instead, all the visual cues suggest that 'Try It Now' is a necessary step in downloading the McAfee software."

In the end, both wound up being charged $5 per month for Raxaco's PerfectDisk (a defrag tool). When one of the women called to complain about the charges to McAfee, she was told there was nothing they could do. Hey, it technically wasn't them that sold the additional software, right?

Call me crazy, but if I was running a high-profile security company I'd want to make damn sure that I steered clear of any shady operations like this.

Confusing pop-up ads which allow a third party to charge additional purchases to your customer's recently-entered credit card info? Which they entrusted to your web store? That's bad business.

...and yes, IT guys, I hear you snickering. "Isn't any McAfee purchase unwanted?"

McAfee in court over misleading pop-up adverts, unwanted purchases originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 14 Apr 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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