It’s quite bs the fact that Appesteem is either just so blind, or they are willing to give any program the stamp of approval, or they are intentionally participating/allowing these scams to occur.
Mycleanid is a program that claims to offer “comprehensive protection against identity theft”. All it does is clear your browsing history, cookies, saved passwords & other auto-filled info. Which any browser can do that for free. It gives you “5 free scans” which mine broke and only gave me 2. Now I spoke to an agent who I asked just for his opinion on if I should buy it and he told me I should. He wanted remote access to my computer in order to send me the payment link. I asked him why he couldn’t just tell me it over the phone and he said that he couldn’t and he needed to connect to my computer. I let him on and he pastes in the link. I again ask him if its worth it and he gives me this word soup of nonsense on why I need the product and insists I need to spend $200 on a 3 year subscription to the product. Eventually, I confront this agent about why I needed to spend $200 when I can do all of this through my browser and browser extensions. And he tells me “it doesn’t work like that”. And he starts saying complete nonsense making it obvious he has no idea what he is talking about. And he claims he’s a software engineer.
Tldr
~Programs hide basic stuff found in browsers behind a paywall
~Agents pressure you to purchase the product even when you don’t need it
~The agent I spoke with didn’t seem to know what he was talking about.
They are also behind USTechSupport.com, of whom I was also skeptical about but was told they were legit by the community. I found it absurd that they had an “ID protector” and how they seemed to be typing for a short time for a long message. They are especially clever in finding a nondescript building, good website design, and proper grammar.
@yishundaodi#138940 I have footage from the call where the agent told me some ridicules stuff about the product itself. The program itself is a scam. It offers pretty much everything your browser can do like erasing cookies and browsing history. Except this program hides that stuff behind a paywall. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmxu9NRRpU0
I did some deeper digging. The signature for the EXE is by RealDefense LLC. They run a bunch of scams. The scariest part is that they have Bitdefender and Hotspot Shield on their website, but it redirects to a domain they own. This makes them be able to sell manipulated versions of legitimate programs at huge markups. I can’t believe the BBB gives them an A+! We need to find a way to shut them down; what they’re doing is absolutely evil.
This one falls into a weird scammy grey area along with stuff like Mac Keeper Pro. These are products that do at least something, kind of, but that also have some combination of being overpriced, provide poor functionality and use scare tactics and/or extremely questionable marketing to sell their product.
it also brings you to https://www.hellotech.com/ which I don’t think has anything to do with them. (Though their reviews are not great, I don’t think hellotech is a scam)