MacKeeper: Legit? Part 2

Following on from my previous post in which I highlighted the interesting and fairly invasive methods that MacKeeper uses to advertise, I figure I’d touch upon it some more. The main reason that I thought I should come back to this was the fact that the ads MacKeeper is using are changing. Before, and especially with the invasive style ads, the main focus of the advertising was that “this is a recommended download to clean and ‘fix’ your Mac”. Really preying on the MacDefender malware going around these days, and at the end of the day making end users all the more cautious.

But now they seem to have gone for a more “look at all this stuff that you get” approach with their advertising (see above), and most importantly, a lot of these new print and image ads that they’re running do not even mention their name. Maybe they believe that their product transcends brand names and that it seems superfluous to mention it, or perhaps they’ve cottoned on to the fact that they’re selling a huge scam and the less they mention their name in their ads, the more likely people are to click on them. Seems fishy. Bear in mind though that they still have the other ads running, especially the great one with the javascript popup, but they less frequently appear. Also, did I mention earlier that some of the ‘awards’ that they received are rather made up.

Now that as a company they’ve realised that people don’t like the sound of their app, maybe it’s for a good reason, and maybe you should stay away too. My advice: avoid, it has all the great makings of a scam, and exactly the same can be done for free – Onyx, TinkerTool etc.