Refund of McAfee Auto-Renewal Subscription?

macman

A friend of mine has just been done for £54.99 for the above, 30 days before expiry (she was switching to Kaspersky anyway on my advice). I've worked out for her how to cancel any future auto-renewal via her online account, but is it possible to get a refund of the new subscription just taken? No clue on the McAfeee support pages (surprise surprise).
If so, I assume this has to be done by phone and it's going to be a struggle?

dogmaryxx

Refund Policy

RussJK

I wouldn't use the sales line, unless you are lucky - they aren't kidding about the up to 30 minutes wait, except that it's longer. The "currently experiencing high volume of calls" was there a year and a half ago.

You'll probably still have to wait if you use the chat.

Best idea is to just write a letter to the headoffice requesting your money back and for the auto renewal to be cancelled. A letter can be a powerful thing, and it means you won't have to wait for them to have some customer service. Send and forget, it'll appear on your statement later on.

RussJK

Mcafee
227 Bath Road
Slough
Berkshire SL1 5PP
United Kingdom
Tel: +44 1753 217500

milesoneill

I recently had to intervene with McAfee on my aunt’s behalf as I was concerned about the amount she was paying for protection (and for any AV, anything over £0.01 is too pricey for me!)
9mths earlier she had bought her laptop, and when asked if she wanted McAfee protection said yes, and paid €59.99. She got the laptop home, powered it all up and went on her way, happy in the knowledge her laptop was protected – not realising she needed to install the McAfee software – She’s not very computer savvy and assumed that since she paid for it, it would be included and fully working.
Just before Christmas she started getting alerts on her desktop saying she wasn’t protected, and to buy McAfee. Thinking it was time for renewal, she bought a €39.99 package (plus a €9.99 backup CD). The site thanked her for her purchase, but she still didn’t realise she had to download and install the software, assuming it was a renewal of licence.
I called McAfee to cancel the recent “renewal”, and only then did I find out she was running two separate subscriptions. There’s a 30day refund available, so I asked them to refund the most recent purchase, and also asked them, very politely, to refund the original purchase as my aunt had never made use of the product.
The sales assistant spoke to her manager but came back with a “No, but we can step you through how to install the software”. I asked again if she could go back to her manager as we didn’t want the software and had never used it. One minute later and they confirmed they’d give a full refund.
To be fair to McAfee, all the refund came through, over €100 worth. So it *is* possible to get refunds. Always be polite but immovable, and gently nudge without forcing.
I’m continually annoyed at the way these products are sold, both at point of sale and through persistent notifications due to being bundled with operating systems.
I’ve now uninstalled all trace of McAfee on my aunts laptop, and she’s now running free Avast, and she’s recently told me how pleased she is that she gets a little notification every day to tell her everything is up to date and she’s protected.
Miles.

SELondon

Receieved email from McAfee annoucing a £54.99 autmatic renewal of software I do not use.

Credit card company can stop future payments but you need to contact McAfee customer service on 0800 028 7581 - option 3 on the voice message service.

They actually answered preety quick and the order number in the email was enough for the service representitive to confirm that they will cancel the subscription, switch off the auto-renewal and refund the £54.99 within 5 working days.

I've fed back that this is an unacceptable practice and would make me do two things going forward
1) Not buy a PC with McAfee bundled
2) Not but McAfee products

After you get your money back I would reccomend you do the same.

macman

You can stop this happening by logging into your McCrappy account and deseletcting auto-renewal. It's enabled by default. Norton use the same devious trick.,

Lum

SELondon wrote: »

I've fed back that this is an unacceptable practice and would make me do two things going forward
1) Not buy a PC with McAfee bundled
2) Not but McAfee products
.

3) Be very careful when installing free software from the internet (even big-name stuff like Java and Flash) as they sometimes bundle a free 90 day trial of McAfee that you must opt out of. This is particularly nasty as in some cases McAfee will then disable your existing AV, install itself and then demand money from you in 90 days time.

As for not buying a PC with McAfee bundled. McAfee subsidise the cost of your PC when you do that, as do plenty of other vendors, so just head straight to http://www.pcdecrapifier.com/ if you're not the kind of person who immediately reformats a new PC after buying it.

And yes McAfee is terrible, consistently has the worst detection rates of the big-name AVs, including the free ones, and is a resource hog too.

debitcardmayhem

SELondon wrote: »

Receieved email from McAfee annoucing a £54.99 autmatic renewal of software I do not use...snipped

Yes of course it is cheaper elsewhere, but why would you pay for it in the first case or in any case. Surely you must have paid for it at some stage, or how can they get your payment details?

waddler_8

Lum wrote: »

3) Be very careful when installing free software from the internet (even big-name stuff like Java and Flash) as they sometimes bundle a free 90 day trial of McAfee that you must opt out of.

It isn't a 90 day trial of Mcafee. It is the Mcafee Security Scan. It is little more than a marketing tool for Mcafee products though. When I tested it, it incorrectly reported my (Windows) firewall was either disabled or turned off.

Lum wrote: »

This is particularly nasty as in some cases McAfee will then disable your existing AV, install itself and then demand money from you in 90 days time.

Incorrect.

Should the Mcafee Security Scan find problems the user is offered the option to "Fix now" & clicking the button will take the user to the Mcafee website where they will be offered the chance to buy Mcafee products - Mcafee will not "install itself" without a fair bit of user interaction.

You are not required to click the "fix now" button, and even if you do, you can then decline the offer to purchase Mcafee products by simply closing the webpage.

Lum

waddler_8 wrote: »

Incorrect.

Indeed you are. Sort Of.

Flash does indeed offer the McAfee security scan which, as you say, is comparatively harmless, and just wastes your time.

Other products have bundled the 90 day trial. I've seen it come down with Java. A Co-worker was insistent that he hadn't removed the official corporate AV (he has admin rights to his own desktop) and even though I didn't believe him I ran the Java installer he'd downloaded inside a virtual machine, didn't untick the McAfee option, and watched with my own eyes as it removed our AV and replaced it with McAfee with a 90 day licence.

That version of McAfee is literally malware.

In any case it's good practice to untick all the "offers" that are bundled with free software.