McAfee fake rebate offer? Anyone else?

hoppingjohn

Hi when I renewed my McAfee sub they offered a $20 rebate, making the whole thing cost a competitive £25. This showed on my receipt and so did my address in the UK.

I had to post in my old CD and a form for the rebate. Six weeks later they sent a link to a site to get the rebate, but the site told me I could not get the rebate outside the US. I asked what I needed to do to get the rebate, and they said provide a US address and that the offer is only valid in US or Canada. I sent them my receipt.

I said either send cheque to UK or refund. They thanked me for participating in the offer and did neither. This gets surreal. One of their replies came from a Symantec email address, not McAfee, and tried to fob me off by saying I had contacted the wrong outfit! They simply stopped responding, possibly because I asked them to tell me where to make a complaint to McAfee.

I had to contact another part of McAfee to finally get the refund, and they said you can only make complaints by Fax and said they could not give me any UK business address for the company for "security reasons."

Doesn't a business have to have an address at Companies House?

Has anyone else had these problems?

Has anyone ever managed to complain to McAfee?

superscaper

Is this more appropriate on the customer vent board? This board is for techie problems, e.g. what can I replace McAfee with?

I'll try giving some thoughts on it anyway.

Although McAfee has a UK address (I just checked on Companies House), I believe it is nothing more than a soliciter's address. So you are not going to get anywhere there other than forwarded on to the same contact details as before. This is an American company so there's no reason to set up an infrastructure in this country. I know the frustration of being banded about by different "arms" of a software company. The symantec thing is weird. But my best advice is to forget it. Cancel your cheque (if it hasn't been cashed or get a refund) and get something else. I don't care how discounted McAfee is, it still isn't worth getting in comparison to other antivirus software. I'm sincere in this because I don't use McAfee yet I can get it absolutely free. AVG (free) or Avast (free) are actually better.

I personally currently use NOD32 which costs £23/year and is much superior to McAfee in both system resource hogging and actual virus detection.

hoppingjohn

Hi thanks for the reply, I'd be delighted if this thread is moved somewhere more appropriate if someone can do that, please?

http://www.mcafee.com/uk/about/contact/uk.html Seems they do have a public office and address in this country, in spite of their alleged security concerns.


OFFICES 227 Bath Road Slough Berkshire SL1 5PPUnited Kingdom


And I did find an email address, but on their Netherlands page!

[EMAIL="Customer_Service@mcafee.com"]Customer_Service@mcafee.com[/EMAIL]

I'm now trying the AVG antivirus and Kerio free firewall.