Q: Beware of MacKeeper
When one installs MacKeeper, which claims to be software to "Clean and protect your Mac" it installs several items of adware and scareware that not only annoy you and urge you to buy stuff that you don't want or need but are possible phishing sites. I downloaded and installed it under the impression that it was free. The ad that caused me to download it said that it was free. I found out that it was free to download but cost money to use. I ran it and upon finding that it wouldn't do anything unless you paid I paid for a month of use ($19.95) and ran it. It claimed that it found and repair somewhere around 12,000 problems. Immediately I started getting webpages popping up trying to sell me Reimage software and foreclosed homes, etc. I ran MacKeeper again and it found and fixed a number of problems. I then decided to check it out and ran a battery of 10 times in succession and each time it found and repaired different number of issues. How can issues arise from one run to the next when I hadn't done anything else? I uninstalled MacKeeper and requested a refund. I immediately started getting webpages purporting to be from Apple and looking like official pages on Apple's site informing me that I had three viruses and that the only course of action was to download MacKeeper (I saved bookmarks to these sites just in case I could find some place to report them to and when I try to go there I get a warning that it's a suspected phishing site. This would happen several times an hour. In the meantime I would continue to get windows trying to get me to but Reimage, foreclosed homes, MacKeeper or what have you. Sometimes I would get a vertical ribbon about 2.5" wide ALLERT telling me don't do anything at all until I called Apple Support at the number they were giving me or urging me to chat online with Apple Support representatives. I finally used EtreCheck to find the malicious files on my system and went through the tedious task of finding them and deleting them. However EtreCheck provided me with the paths to them.
Posted on Aug 26, 2016 2:31 PM