[NEWS] Why does www.avast.eu take me to the Avira website?

[bender8858]

Spoiler:

Having over 100 million users has its downside—it means that users searching for Avast are also a prime target of scammers as well as legitimate companies trying to piggy-back on our name recognition. Every day we receive complaints from people that have been scammed. Some have been scammed into paying to download a free copy of Avast. Others have been tricked into buying a product they thought was Avast but was not. This happens in many different ways but at the core is the greatest scourge of the internet—socially engineered scams and deceptions. Thieves and even legitimate companies are masters at taking advantage of people’s natural penchant to trust others. Some scams are quite blatant and most of us would consider them theft or cheating. Others are much less obvious and may even be considered zealous marketing and selling. One finds such deceptions in search results, on download sites, and even in internet domain names. Cybersquatting (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybersquatting) is a common means of scamming a user. In this someone (or another company) uses the Avast name to sell their own products—real or fake. For example, a European might decide to download our product by going to www.avast.eu (.eu stands for the European Union). But if they do so, they will find themselves on the website for Avira—a completely different antivirus company. Of course there is nothing on the Avira website indicating to the user that they have been misled. While this is behavior one would expect from dodgy or fraudulent websites, Avira is actually a legitimate company and makes a very good antivirus product. Since Avira’s CEO and Attorney have ignored countless emails and phone calls, your guess is as good as mine as to why Avira is doing this. Maybe they are trying to irritate us. Maybe they believe the name is theirs. Or maybe they have found it profitable to mislead unsuspecting internet users.

http://blog.avast.com/2010/03/29/why...uilt-on-trust/