Dear Avast,
I am from Greece. Yesterday I saw a strange charge in my credit card statement. The description of the charge was “PAYPAL * DRI AVAST SOFTWARE 3531436900” and the charge €45.32.
I have to inform you that I am a bank employee, I have already talked with my personal lawyer and i have send letter in General Comittee of Customer Protection after their guidance.
After the ILLEGAL charge of my credit card I searched all my e-mails and I found that you have send me mails that I never read and I never replied to you.
Your company acts are against EU rules and laws about Consumer Protection http://eur-lex.europa.eu/summary/chapter/consumers.html?locale=el&root_default=SUM_1_CODED%3D09 and the Greek legislation as well.
I have never given to your company my credit card safety number or my PIN. The outregious charge of 45euros is a total madness and you must have the right answer as company.
My credit card was in use for my loan and with your charge I had a major penalty from my bank without knowing your charge. I have lost more than 250euros from your company acts.
Regarding to your immediate compensate actions.Waiting to see the charge back in 24hours. Thank you
P.S.: I have not activate anything from your company, even you charged me. BECAUSE I DIDN’T KNOW ANYTHING!!!
It seems to me that you either did not end a trial of a paid avast version or that you bought a license in the past and never did disable the auto-renewal.
In both cases you gave avast permission for the transaction, there is nothing illegal about it at all.
avast can’t help it if you don’t read the mails.
They have given you enough time to take action before the transaction took place.
Dear Eddy,
Probably you don’t Know the EU legislation. No problem for you. Big trouble for Avast. The case attracted the interest of the Greek General Comittee for Consumers Protection. Of course I am not the only one with that problem.
Consider something else…
All the members of the forum are taking a mail from the admin…
Thank you for the contribution of 5€ to the X charity…
Aaaaa…if you dont’t want to charge you say NO…
So…don’t be rediculus. We all know how is business. It is statistics. Let’s do it to some thousand clients…free edition…and then charge them without confirmation of the payment. IF I WANT TO BUY SOMETHING I CAN CONFIRM THE PAYMENT OF THE PRODUCT!!!Confirm each payment without any existence of fraud.
The statistics say that the company will gain money. Some people, maybe the minority will reclaim the money back. And the will take them. Some others maybe they will try to do something byt in the way the will quit the effort.
Some others…wait and see…!!!
Dear vlasis7x,
I appreciate and understand your concern. It is important to remember that, most of the licenses today are treated as a “subscription”. This is quite common not just with Avast, but also with other licenses, for example My Spotify Netflix & Google Apps is a subscription based license.
We implemented the same for Avast customers. You can disable the auto-renewal during the purchase or afterwards.
We will be more than happy to assist you if resolving the case when you had missed all the emails that we sent about upcoming charge for license for another year.
vlasis7x, it seems unfair to accuse Avast of performing illegal things. You confirmed that during purchase, we also sent you several emails where we said “hey, we are going to charge you for next year subscription. If you don’t want it please cancel the subscription (we call it auto-renewal)”. I understand your frustration completely I do. The charge was unexpected from your side. But not illegal neither fraud. Avast is a worldwide, well-respected and successful company as we respect the rules, we care about our customers.
I’m glad that you submitted an official support request via our portal at https://support.avast.com and we will handle this following our refund request process. While I appreciate you feel more comfortable following the process of an EU legislation action, or a Greek General Committee for Consumers protection, it unfortunately will not speed up the process, and could unfortunately slow things down.
You have done the correct thing by creating a ticket request, and as mentioned we will look into this for you, and one of our colleagues will contact you as soon as possible via that method. I’m locking this topic, as it may only become a flamewar. To cut a long story short, we are sorry that you haven’t reacted in time. Lets resolve this now!
Your original purchase order was 60 day trial which automatically continued as 1 year license. No worries, this case is similar to the auto-renewal or a “wrong product purchase” case.