Is McAfee's siteadvisor.com a scam?

Re:Is McAfee's siteadvisor.com a scam? by trotsky on Saturday April 02, 2011 @10:48PM (#2401612)

Then one day it suddenly hit me.. You see the thing is McAfee siteadvisor.com also sells these hacker-safe certificates to websites for $360 / year. With that in picture, this whole fucking thing just makes sense. This is just a ploy to sell those certificates.

That is some serious ass jumping to conclusions. I feel for the guy, his situation sucks. BUT:

He just up and one day decided that they're doing it to sell him some snake oil.

  - Nobody from McAfee suggested he buy the snake oil.
  - Nobody else told him, "oh that is a scam to get you to buy snake oil".
  - He didn't ask around to see if it's happening to a lot of other people.
  - He didn't try to buy said snake oil to confirm it would make a difference

Clearly McAfee siteadvisor sounds broken/underfunded/lazy/all of the above. It sucks he can't get them to deal with it. But if it was some kind of cyber protection racket it'd be happening to a lot of people with similar results. And they'd have to give you some hints as to how to "get protected". I've hosted a number of websites with executables throughout the years including one that has a bunch and is active right now. I've never been on a McAfee blacklist. I've never even heard of anyone I know being on a McAfee blacklist. If it was some kind of protection racket wouldn't they just be mass flagging things?

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity - Hanlon's razor

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Re:Is McAfee's siteadvisor.com a scam? by agj on Sunday April 03, 2011 @12:44PM (#2403138)

It doesn't sound like the OP tried very hard to resolve this before deducing this was all a scam that had to come to light. McAfee isn't going to resolve this out of goodwill after several email complaints -- I wouldn't trust them to. The OP needs to try harder to light a fire under someone's ass. McAfee has little to nothing to gain from bending to the whim of flagged sites.

To say that the OP's experience would be different as a paying customer, either as a mere AV subscriber or as a subscriber to their hacker-safe service, is an unfounded assumption -- to say the next step is forking over protection money and that this is all a scam is pure sensationalist FUD.

I'm firmly in the skeptic camp. Without any evidence, the OP's site could be legitimately flagged. Also, I sure as hell wouldn't let this linger for 2 years. Maybe I missed something though, I gave up on the comments after a minute, my tolerance to the reddit front page hivemind is very low.

Also - thanks for introducing me to Hanlon's razor, it's now posted in my office.

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Re:Is McAfee's siteadvisor.com a scam? by ohashi on Sunday April 03, 2011 @10:56AM (#2402829)

They don't have to tell him. He is watching his customers disappear and business is hurting. He is spending all this time trying to figure out a solution. He did come around to the realization that for money, they will probably fix his problem that they created in the first place.

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