From an antivirus point of view, there are good products that protect you and try to innovate, medium products whose performance is not always excellent, and bad products that should be avoided. But there is another category that we don’t often talk about: products that try to confuse the minds of users, trying to extract money from them. Today we are considering the difficult case of Total AV: then what is the quality of the antivirus or product that should be avoided?
Total AV is the best Antivirus?
It is noteworthy that few people have heard of this product, is it? And it would be suspicious. But driving in Google a request for the best antivirus, and we find Total AB in sponsored links, i.e. paid for promotion.
When we scan a page, it’s completely unknown how AV crowds out all of its competitors. It has many qualities:
- improved firewall
- good malware protection
- scanner
- VPN
In addition, the product is offered at a fairly cheap price, compared with colleagues. And here we are going to another page and … wait for the minute. On this other page, Total AV is positioned free. Where is the truth? To do this, we go to the official website of the product and select the free version.
At the end of the installation, we are invited to create an account to use the free product. This is done in seconds, the time when the configuration ends and Total AV is running.
What happens after installation
When we go to the interface, Total AV automatically starts the analysis of your machine: antivirus, system optimization, disk cleanup and protection on the Internet. For information, we installed the software on a computer that was recently formatted without any other program besides those present by default.
At the end of our analysis, a picture appears that speaks of the abundance of threats and faults. And this is after we checked the system. Moreover, the program says that the new installation occurred incorrectly and needs to be fixed. And for this, in fact, if you want a full-fledged antivirus, you must go to the cashier and redirect you to the payment page, i.e. pay money right now!
An interesting pattern: looking through the page, we encounter an asterisk, which brings us some valuable information: the purchase of Total AV is accompanied by the acceptance of several conditions, as well as an automatic extension every year at a standard price. Remember that the promotional price at that time is 19 € and the base price is 99 €. Finally, we saw the following message before reading the end of the sentence: Prices do not include VAT. Thus, you must add 20% to the specified price to find out the cost. Thus, automatic renewal will cost 118 € instead of 99 €.
What is the conclusion?
Is this a real antivirus? Obviously not in the free version. Total AV is nothing more than a scanning tool, the sole purpose of which is to force the user to buy the paid version: with the help of a security alert, attractive prices, various offers. By the way, just type “Total AV Reviews” in the search engines to find an impressive amount of feedback from disgruntled users on the forums. So we can talk about fraud? Legally not, because everything is indicated on their website, even if it is in small print. On the other hand, from a moral point of view, everyone can form their own opinion, but we think that this is a dishonest move on the part of the company.