Advanced Tech Support Tyler Steve(Manager) www.fix22.com Extremely suspicious in all respects. Either just ripping people off OR totally criminal. Internet

I have been using SpamFighter for at least a couple of years, in conjunction with Mozilla Thunderbird Email.  It's very useful.

Spamfighter came up for license renewal a couple of days ago and I went through the process with them.

I succumbed to their suggestion to acquire DriverFighter along with the SpamFighter renewal at a "bargain" price for doing them both, together.

I downloaded DriverFighter and tried to install it.  The install failed, but apparently it partially (at least) installed and was capable of running and telling me I had 20 drivers needing updating. To proceed, I had to enter the license key, which I had received in an email from service@spamfighter.com, which looked genuine enough, EXCEPT for the following:

This email also stated that, "To activate the Product key, please call (888) 248-4794.  THIS SEEMED VERY STRANGE, as I have never (in literally 47 years of computer experience (working in IT, not just at home) come across such a weird and unnecessary requirement.

Instead of immediately calling the number, I tried copying and pasting the key (from the email I received) into the DriverFighter "Account" "Submit Product Key" box then clicking on the Submit button, then it told me, "There was an internal error activating this product key. Please try again later. If the problem persists, please contact Support."  In decades of PC and Mac and other computing with all sorts of occasional problems (we all have), I've NEVER come across a simple on-line license key registration issue!

I called the support number and the guy (Tyler) sounded like he's in a scammy boiler room, people yelling all over the place, and asking me "What's wrong with your computer?" and stupid questions that were clearly a come-on to buying something.  I assumed he wanted me to buy some more software products, but from the 10 other complaints about these folks I can see they wanted to scam me to PAY THEM TO TAKE OVER MY COMPUTER and royally screw it up to feed the scam even further if possible.

I spoke with Tyler's manager, Steve, who gave a glib explanation that sounded semi-legit, then went back to Tyler who took me to the next step.

Since Tyler wanted to connect to my computer (through fix22.com) to "help" me set the product key, I was extremely SUSPICIOUS, over and above the concerns I've just mentioned. The last thing I need is for some level-zero jerks to be rampaging round my nice hot Win 8 64-bit machine, wrecking everything and opening it up for exploitation by them and anyone else in their lousy business.

The last straw was that my BitDefender program - which I only bought a couple of months ago after doing oodles of research and deciding that it was a good and honest product - told me:

BITDEFENDER BLOCKED THIS PAGE. This page is blocked by BitDefender anti-malware filter. With a button to click on to TAKE ME BACK TO SAFETY.

This convinced me that I needed to stay away from these unprincipled turds and get my money back rather than get sucked into their game. They actually were polite about that and gave me a "Refund#" and the fighterhelp.com URL to use for that purpose. I guess they are semi-professional about ripping people off while appearing to be legitimate.

My big question is this - still to be pursued: HOW DID SPAMFIGHTER GET ALLIED WITH THESE BASTARDS, OR DID THE LATTER FOLKS PHISH MY EMAIL FROM SPAMFIGHTER, TO MAKE IT LOOK LEGIT BUT NOT?