Ongoing MacKeeper fraud

  • 20 November 2014
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Ongoing MacKeeper fraud

Posted on November 2nd, 2014 at 11:04 AM EST
 
 
Controversy about MacKeeper has been around almost as long as MacKeeper has existed. It is one of the most aggressively-marketed products in the Mac world, and there are numerous accusations that it isn’t useful or even that it is fraudulent. At the same time, you will find a number of positive reviews out there. How do you know what’s true? In this article, I will make the case that MacKeeper, and the company behind it (ZeoBIT/Kromtech), are not to be trusted.
 
First, a little history. MacKeeper first caught my attention in 2011, when ZeoBIT set up a fake ClamXav site. (The real ClamXav site is clamxav.com, while the fake site set up by ZeoBIT was clamxav.org. At right is a screenshot of the original clamxav.org site, pulled from the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.)
 
This fake ClamXav site included an overview of ClamXav, making it sound like the page was an official ClamXav page, yet at the bottom, the green Download button would take the user to the MacKeeper site. This persisted for some time, until eventually the tide of public opinion caused ZeoBIT to change the site. They obfuscated their ownership of the site, using the WhoisGuard service, and changed the content.
 
There is no proof today that ZeoBIT (aka Kromtech) still owns the clamxav.org domain. That domain’s ownership is still hidden behind the WhoisGuard service. However, it’s probably not coincidence that the clamxav.org, mackeeper.com, zeobit.com and kromtech.net sites all are registered with eNom, Inc.
 
Around that time, I wrote an article titled Beware MacKeeper. Soon after, I was contacted by a ZeoBIT representative named Mike Clark, offering to pay me for some unnamed consulting work, and giving an explanation for the unethical advertising that I would hear many times over the intervening years: an affiliate was to blame. As he told me at the time, “We pay a 50% affiliate commission and sometimes our affiliates go wild and have a lapse in judgement with the way Mackeeper is promoted.”
 
Full Article Here
 

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