SALLY SORTS IT: My anti-virus cover ended in 2017 but McAfee kept on billing me

I recently logged into my account with software security firm McAfee. 

My account showed that the anti-virus and internet security on my HP laptop had expired in January 2017.

I rang the firm to ask why, if it had expired, it had continued to take the annual subscription fee from my Nationwide credit card every June since 2018. I requested a refund of the £570 taken over the years.

At first, the call handler told me I must have been scammed and the company had not received these payments, but on re-checking, he said the money had been received. 

I was only offered a refund of one year’s payment, which is unacceptable, considering I had no protection in all the years I paid for it. Can you help?

S. F., Teddington, Middlesex.

Annual fees: A reader wants a £570 refund after anti-virus software firm McAfee kept billing her despite having stopped their cover back in 2017

Sally Hamilton replies: I expected this to be one of my simpler cases to resolve. 

This proved to be a naive hope, as when trying to email McAfee, it was as if my missives were themselves the viruses that its security software promises to keep out of a customer’s computer system.

Four times over four weeks I emailed. Four times I received an automated response that lulled me into believing my enquiry would be dealt with ‘as soon as we are able’.

Customer services also needed my customer number, and as I am not a customer I got no further. 

Despite this, I did receive one phone call from a customer services person, but they couldn’t hear me and so cut me off. Aargh.

I resorted to contacting the chief executive of the company directly. Greg Johnson is the CEO of McAfee in America. 

I sent an email to his address, which I guessed — correctly, as it turns out — and copied in the same press office that had promised to get back to me. I requested you be refunded in full.

Lo and behold, within a few hours, Greg responded. There was an apology and a promise that he was ‘escalating [my] request to our head of customer success’. 

This job role was new to me and amused me enough to mollify my initial irritation. My new contact hastily arranged your £570 refund. Success.

On investigation, McAfee discovered your family had not one, but three accounts. The second was the problematic one.

It was set up with a mistyped email address and was never activated, but you were wrongly charged for it, using the same bank details as your first account (which you cancelled in 2017). 

A spokesman says: ‘With thanks to the Daily Mail, and after thorough investigation and the discovery of the account with an incorrect email address, we were able to confirm the account had not been activated and we provided a full refund to S. F. last month.’

Birthday trip ruined by illness 

My wife and I are in our late 70s. I saved my spare pennies to treat us both to a weekend away at the Potters Resorts Five Lakes in Essex, to celebrate her birthday. The £1,193 price included drinks, food and entertainment as well as £15 insurance.

When arriving at the resort on June 9, we were asked to check in early, at 2pm rather than 3pm, only to be told to wait for staff, who would give us a pack containing the itinerary of our stay.

Alongside this, we were given a pamphlet informing us of the measures we should take should we feel unwell. The staff did not elaborate on this, but there was a number to ring for assistance.

The first evening went OK, but the next day after lunch we began to feel unwell. That evening we could not eat the food we had paid for. We soldiered on and went to see the show, only to be told there were technical issues.

That night, my wife fell violently ill, and continued to be sick for several hours. Then it was my turn. We tried to ring the number in the pamphlet multiple times, but nobody answered. By 6.30am we had managed to inform the night manager of our illness and told him we had decided to return home.

So, at 7am on June 11, we left, two days early. We’d paid almost £1,200 for one day of food and (not much) entertainment. 

The night manager assured us he would deal with the refund, and that they also had other guests to assess. The compensation offer we received was for £393.

If the resort had given us all the information and offered an option to rebook based on the outbreak of the illness, which it appears it was fully aware of, we would have done so. I feel we should get a full refund.

B. M., Essex.

Sally Hamilton replies: Your tale of woe made me feel queasy, although not to the same extent as you and your poor wife felt on her curtailed birthday trip.

I checked out Potters Resorts’ booking conditions and found the following: ‘Your booking is accepted on the understanding that norovirus and/or similar contagious bugs… can be present in the general population at large and can affect any public space, and are beyond our control.

‘Your holiday contract is issued on the understanding that the company operates as one such public space and therefore cannot be immune to the potential of norovirus and/or similar bugs.’

Norovirus is obviously something of general concern to the company and, I’m sure, to many holiday firms. It is fair enough for a resort to protect itself from the sea of complaints it would inevitably receive following a norovirus outbreak, but I felt like you and your wife were being sent like lambs to the slaughter by not being informed of its presence in the resort at the time you checked in.

While norovirus is not dangerous for most people, it can have more serious consequences for the elderly or those with underlying health conditions. Since you had been treated for cancer, leaving you with compromised immunity, and also suffer from a heart condition, you felt you had been put at risk.

You’d issued a Freedom of Information request to the council, which confirmed it had been informed of the outbreak of norovirus on the day you checked in, and that the UK Health Security Agency and Maldon District Council had gone on to advise the resort to close for a ‘firebreak’ from June 19 to 23 to allow for extra-deep cleaning.

To me that was enough to earn you a full refund. However, Potters Resorts only proffered £393, which I suspect is all that the insurance that was sold by the resort would pay for curtailment. Had the resort been unaware of the outbreak when you arrived, I might have accepted this. But letting you check in while knowing the virus was present was not acceptable.

I asked Potters Resorts to investigate your case. A couple of weeks later the full £1,193 you’d paid had landed back in your bank account. You were happy.

Your experience is a reminder to all holidaymakers that taking out your own travel insurance is a must.

• Write to Sally Hamilton at Sally Sorts It, Money Mail, Northcliffe House, 2 Derry Street, London W8 5TT or email [email protected] — include phone number, address and a note addressed to the offending organisation giving them permission to talk to Sally Hamilton. Please do not send original documents as we cannot take responsibility for them. No legal responsibility can be accepted by the Daily Mail for answers given. 

This post first appeared on Dailymail.co.uk