I saw this computer anti-virus service advertised on Court TV, the History Channel, or some other cable channel. That should have been my first clue, but I bit anyway.
I went to their website and found that I could download their anti-virus scanner for free. Of course, this will only detect viruses and not fix them. Virus removal would require payment of a fee. Fair enough, especially since I had no reason to believe that my computer was infected.
I downloaded their software and ran the virus scan. Damn if it did not find about 40 suspected spyware cookies and a virus imbedded in 7 temporary files! The report showed it had scanned about 55,000 files on my PC.
Now I was worried, so I decided to take them up on their offer to remove the viruses and spyware. I had seen that they had several levels of service available and the $4-a-month plan seemed reasonable to me. (Works out to about $48 a year. Reasonable.) But in order to subscribe to the monthly service you had to agree to buy one of two other services to remove the viruses. One service was to get help by email and the more expensive option was to get help by phone. Suddenly the overall price was going up. I was also curious why all this help was required and finally concluded that their software can find viruses but cannot automatically repair them, hence the need for manual action. But that's just a guess because I did not buy their service. I was just too suspicious by this point. I then uninstalled the Stop-Sign software.
Still, I had an infected computer that needed to be decontaminated. So I went to the Norton Anti-Virus site (Symantec.com) and bought their download package for $49.95. I downloaded the Norton program and scanned my files. First, Norton found about 10,000 more files than Stop-Sign. Second, Norton found no spyware and no viruses!
Thanks to Stop-Sign.com I spent $50 on software that I did not need to repair a problem that did not exist.
I can only conclude that Stop-Sign downloaded the spyware and viruses that it pretended to find. When I uninstalled Stop-Sign, the alleged viruses and spyware got deleted.
With God as my witness, I hereby promise to never again buy anything that is advertised only on a cable TV channel.
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