Mackeeper reviews 20154/10/2023 Interestingly, the one thing that the user would have intended to get from this installer – Adobe Flash Player – was somehow not installed. Of course, this installer actually included MacKeeper, as well as some other adware and PUPs. Especially given the previously-documented association with these fake Tapsnake virus scams, which were blamed on “affiliates.”Ĭlicking the Download Flash button resulted in the download of an installer that claimed to be an Adobe Flash Player installer. However, it is interesting that MacKeeper itself is telling me that I need to worry about Tapsnake, to scare me into paying (emphasis added) for its anti-virus features. Funny, you’d think we would have heard something about such a large-scale Tapsnake infection, but no… that didn’t happen. Note that the “tech” tells me that there’s “a new virus called Tapsnake that has infected many Macs worldwide.” I’ve had MacKeeper tell me this three times, on three different days and in three different installations of the software. It was Android malware that was seen back in 2010, which no longer exists and which was never seen on the Mac. Here’s the thing, though… there is no such thing as Tapsnake on the Mac. …the site claims that “Tapsnake” has been detected, and then proceeds to push MacKeeper as a “required” download to remove Tapsnake. Although much of this aggressive marketing is actually performed by "affiliates" (who receive a large cut of the proceeds), it is notable that over the several years that MacKeeper has been in operation, they have taken no noticeable steps to rein in these "affiliates".Īccording to a Malwarebytes blog article explaining why they added MacKeeper to their Potentially Unwanted Programs (PUP) list: MacKeeper routinely uses marketing techniques which, even if viewed in the most charitable light possible, seem likely to skirt the seedier edges of consumer law even if, in some particular jurisdiction, they do not actually violate it. So bluntly: Is MacKeeper software a scam? Or is it just bad and questionable software with an aggressive marketing campaign behind it and not much else?įirstly, let's define "scam": my dictionary says a dishonest scheme, while my thesaurus suggests confidence trick which "…exploits characteristics of the human psyche, such as credulity, naïveté…" The lawsuit was settled in 2015 for US $2 million without any admission of guilt by the company.” MacKeeper faced a class-action lawsuit because the company allegedly deceived users into paying for unneeded fixes. It is heavily promoted through aggressive advertising and affiliate marketing. It has been accused of not performing as advertised and being difficult to fully uninstall. “MacKeeper is software distributed by Kromtech Alliance and marketed as a way to secure, clean, protect and optimize a computer operating system. The Wikipedia entry for it doesn’t praise it, but it doesn’t seem to be much more than bad software and not much else: “You don't need this software, avoid it.”.Run MalwareBytes on your Mac and it will remove MacKeeper.” But is MacKeeper software itself actually a scam? Pretty much all of the answers on that page imply in one way or another that MacKeeper software is part of a scam scheme and here are choice bits: The long and short of it is, the original poster recently purchased a copy of MacKeeper and was then contacted by phone by someone claiming to be a part of the MacKeeper team requesting access to the original poster’s computer system: Desktop, files, etc… This question is based on this question recently asked on Ask Different.
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