"A Thursday in January I’m working on a client project from my home office, go to one of their clients’ websites and download some files. Open one of them Friday and my virus program, Vipre tells me it has prevented an intrusion attempt. At the end of the day, start a full system scan. Saturday morning I check the computer, Vipre tells me it has detected a trojan but cannot delete or quarantine it. I send a note to tech support, they say download Vipre 2014, install, and run a scan in safe mode – that should take care of it. But Vipre 2014 will not install. Now I phone them.

The phone call connects me to itechline.com, which I assume is handling Vipre tech support. The technician has me download remote control software, looks at my machine, brings up a number of files and says I have a serious problem, look at all the files that are corrupted. But since this is a trojan, and thus something I downloaded, not part of the free service from Vipre. They need to charge me $200 - and they want my credit card. I pay.

So one technician starts on my HP workstation, this guy talks to my daughter, who is visiting and working from her laptop plugged into my network. He remotes in, points out files on her laptop that he says are evidence that she’s been hit. But no, she’s uncomfortable. It’s her employer’s machine. Says she will talk to her IT department. Hangs up with him and calls IT. She reads them the file names and they say, no, those are legitimate files that are part of the operating system – she has no problem.

In the meantime, the technician has remoted into my second machine, a laptop, and says, hey, look at all these bad files. OK, I say, can you fix this? Yes, and should they I charge the same credit card? Wait a minute, I’ve already paid you $200. Oh, no, it’s $200 per machine - $600 total. I say, I’m going to run a full Vipre scan (have 2014 on the laptop) and call him back if I find a problem. He backs off. The scan turns up nothing, and when I check the files he showed me later on, I see that they are random error messages that have nothing to do with the trojan. The laptop has shown no signs of any problem to this day.

Back to my workstation. I watch the second itechline technician run various malware programs and a registry clean program, then he tries to install Vipre 2014. It won’t install. I have to leave – give him my cell phone number. He keeps working. Several hours later he calls, says it’s all fixed, but when I get home that evening I see he has wiped out all my administrator settings, my screen background is gone, all the changes I made to the task bar – and checking farther I find I can’t open any Adobe programs; other programs want me to register again or reinstall certain components. OK, the technicians would say it was the trojan that did all this damage, but all that software worked properly before they took over my computer. And the last thing – they never did install Vipre, but installed Kaspersky instead. I’m out $200 and my machine doesn’t work.

Here’s what I believe happened. I was running Windows XP 64 bit, which has always been kind of an orphan and hard to find software that runs on it properly. I’m pretty sure that Vipre 2014 will not run on XP-X64, although 2012 and 2013 did, and that was the problem I had trying to install it. And so these technicians were not able to install it either. Not understanding the problem, they kept trying things until they pretty much destroyed my computer.

The thing I cannot forgive, however, was telling me that two laptops were corrupt when they weren’t, telling me my network was corrupt when it wasn’t, and trying to sell me a total of $600 worth of service, at least $400 of which was completely unneeded. Their approach was very much like the furnace or waterproofing companies who try to burn elderly homeowners for thousands of dollars in repairs that they don’t need.

Be warned."