Paypal

[Caran]

OH had an email regarding our account. It was just to notify him that Avast had taken £39.99 for their services. Neither of us has authorised this. We do not pay for security only take free ones occasionally.
He has disputed this. What will happen now? What are our chances of getting this refunded?

[pixie374]

MacAffee did that to me. I rang them and they refunded it straight away.

[Caran]

I've suggested we ring them but he wants to see what Paypal will do.

[Buenchico]

The first thing that occurs to me is that you might need to question the authenticity of that email.

Scammers often send out fake emails which appear to be from PayPal, apparently confirming that an unrecognised payment has been made for goods or services. Sometimes their aim is to get victims to reveal details of their PayPal (or bank) accounts but another trick is to get them to open an attachment in order to view details of the (fictional) transaction. Doing so then dumps malware onto the victim's computer, leaving them at risk of something really nasty happening in the second phase of the scam.

So, if your OH opened an attachment that accompanied the email it's now ESSENTIAL that he runs a full scan with his anti-virus software AND runs a malware scan with a relevant program. (If he's ALREADY got the free version of Malwarebytes Anti-Malware on his machine he should use that. If he's NOT got an anti-malware program he should download, install and run AdwCleaner: https://www.malwarebytes.com/adwcleaner )

Avast is a reputable company but even the shadiest company in the world CAN'T take money from either your bank account or your PayPal acccount unless you provided them with your account details (or otherwise authorised the transaction), so something simply doesn't add up here.

[Islay]

I had this it was kosher - when you signed up you probably signed up to a rolling payment - I disputed it and got my money back in 3 days

[Caran]

The email was kosher, he logged on to our account and the payment had been taken.
We had not signed up to any payments to Avast, we only ever used free security.

[Islay]

Well I don't mean to be difficult but you must have provided them your details - so I suspect that the 'free' one was a trial period that you ended up paying for.