We recently were contacted with a strange request. Someone was asking us for a refund for a hack cleanup plan. We don’t have any such plans. We provide onetime cleanups and we only charge after the hack cleanup is completed. It turned out that the person had somehow run across a two-year-old post of ours warning about a provider named Malcare, titled MalCare Review: It’s Obvious They Are Taking Advantage of Their Customers, and then contacted us as if we were Malcare.
The request for a refund mentioned things that were in line with what we were warning about two years ago. They wrote this in part:
Your plan was not working out as planned. I am still cleaning up a lot of damage since my site was hacked, I had to resort to a different plan.
And this:
Looking at the backup you had on your site, the database was filled with numerous users, of which I did not know. I had to clean up my database manually.
After dealing with that, we were curious to see if other of their customers have been complaining about their service recently. What we saw was that people are still being misled by them in to believing that their service offers things it doesn’t, while another of their customers who are not criticizing the service refuted that.
Here is part of one recent customer review:
Definitely a game-changer for our websites. Full removal of hacks and complete protection from current and future attempts.
The customer obviously doesn’t know that it will actually offer complete protection from future hacking attempts. The service can’t do that, but everything we have seen it won’t even do a good job of the protection it could possibly offer. Don’t take our word for that. Here was part of another recent positive customer review:
MalCare and the team behind it have gone above and beyond their stated service to help me restore my website from malicious hacks of my WordPress website. On more than one occasion they were able to scan and clean my site of infected files. Anyone who has a website knows how horrible it feels to learn that your site has been hacked.
Based on that, their website has been hacked at least once while using MalCare’s service. If that wasn’t the case, they wouldn’t have been cleaning it up multiple times, unless they failed to properly clean it up the first time.