I have some questions about websites that claim to be a "Symantec Registered Partner" and/or sell Norton products such as NIS 2009.
For instance I looked up "Norton Internet Security 2009" on Amazon, and I noticed that (at the time of this writing) at the bottom of the Amazon search-results page are three "Sponsored Links". It's my understanding that "sponsored" just means that someone paid them to put the links there, so I don't think it necessarily gives those links any greater degree of legitimacy (if I'm wrong about that, please advise).
Site #1 appears (maybe) to go to an actual Norton site (Symantecstore.com, at least that's what shows in the address bar, although it's my understanding that that address can be forged or altered without the user's knowledge (redirects or silent domain-forwarding or something like that, maybe not the right terms).
It's mainly the *others* I'm suspicious of:
(If the following are legit sites, then my apologies in advance to the owners, but frankly it's quite difficult to tell what's legit and what isn't - and I think this may be beyond the scope of the Norton toolbar which sometimes gives the green-light to too much stuff anyway IMO, and when I click "learn more" it shows info unrelated to the website in question.)
Site #3 first:
www.Symantec-Norton.com which has the Norton logo at the bottom and claims to be a "Symantec Registered Partner" - I looked up that domain name to see who owns it and it's *not* Symantec or Norton; it's registered to someone in an apartment in California (I don't know if I'm supposed to post the actual address here, but anyone can find it for themselves at dns411.com or some other similar look-up site), but...
Now here's something strange:
I tried to look up "Symantec-Norton.com" at the Norton "Locate a partner" sites at http://www.symantec.com/partners/index.jsp and http://partnerlocator.symantec.com/public/search/ . After dutifully selecting my country (U.S.) and then typing in the name "Symantec-Norton.com", the Norton site gave me the following non-helpful message:
"More than 500 results matched the search criteria you entered. The first 500 are displayed. You can narrow your search by selecting additional or different criteria".
I already typed in the EXACT name of the company/website - how much more specific could I get? If I can't even "narrow your search" by typing in the exact name, then the whole search is pointless. The results list is *500 pages long* and is *NOT* sorted alphabetically, so it's not helping me to find out whether or not that company is legit or some sort of scam.
(Symantec needs to improve the functionality of that Partner Program website so that customers can check such things - most people are not going to wade through 500 pages of search-results.) I gave up on trying to find any useful info there.
I even clicked the "Find a Distributor" link at http://www.symantec.com/partners/programs/channel/distributorlist.jsp and the U.S. and Canada distributor list shows only 10 companies - none of which appear to be related to "Symantec-Norton.com" if their street addresses are any indication.
So what is this mysterious "Symantec Registered Partner" thing, and how can normal people (customers) check to see if a particular company is legit or not, since the above-mentioned search page is useless?
Something else, another clue maybe (?) at "Symantec Trademark Usage Guidelines" at http://www.symantec.com/about/profile/policies/trademarks.jsp there is no mention whatsoever of "Symantec Registered Partner", or even "registered partner", or even "partner". I searched the entire page for the word "partner" and found nothing except for the unhelpful Partner link to http://www.symantec.com/partners/index.jsp which turned up nothing, as I already described above. So is there even such a thing as "Symantec Registered Partner" and are sites that claim to be a "Symantec Registered Partner" allowed to use the Symantec logo, and to sell Norton software? Or is it all just some clever scam to con people into buying non-authentic software?
Site #2:
The *second* Amazon "Sponsored Link" Norton Internet Security 2009 site is someplace called www.eonlinesoftware.com where they're selling downloadable NIS 2009 for $23.97 (and NIS 2009 3-user for $44.97 - so what's the $23.97 version, maybe one-user or something?). FWIW, eonlinesoftware.com doesn't claim to be a Symantec Registered Partner, and it doesn't display the Norton logo. The eonlinesoftware.com domain is registered with something called "NameCheap.com" (that doesn't exactly inspire my confidence) and the eonlinesoftware.com lookup info looks suspicious:
Registrant Contact:
WhoisGuard
WhoisGuard Protected ()
8939 S. Sepulveda Blvd. #110 - 732
Westchester, CA 90045
US
If they're a bonafide legit business, I am wondering why they're hiding behind WhoisGuard. I can fully understand why a hobbyist website or a regular private non-business individual might want to use such a thing (especially for women or others who don't want to be hassled by stalkers (people have been known to become murder-victims that way) and have their home residence address and phone number published online for all to see including spambots/criminals/etc), or for normal people wishing to avoid spammers/weirdos/creeps/identity-theft/etc where they're not selling anything online, but a BUSINESS that's selling stuff ought to have REAL contact info, shouldn't it? Or am I just being overly paranoid?
Anyway, I wouldn't personally buy from anyplace other than an actual Symantec website (not some knockoff/copycat website) or a brick-and-mortar store, just to save a few bucks (unless, as happened to me a zillion years ago, Digital River kept dropping the connection before I could complete the order and I finally gave up on it after 12 hours futily trying to buy something there - hasn't happened in recent years though), but I wonder about those "Sponsored Links" at Amazon and if some of them *are* scams or pirated software or something, I wonder how many people have been suckered into buying software that, heck for all I know, maybe it's been tampered with or modified in some way?
Yes, I did check one of those websites listed above, at a Norton webpage which I can't even find again now ... why is it so darn *difficult*
to find out useful info? - but the info at that Norton page (wherever it was) was inconclusive - someone else had written that they thought the site looked suspicious but no further info. Maybe I'm naive, but it seems to me that in that case where someone is actually selling Norton software and using the Norton logo, that Norton's legal department or anti-piracy department (or some department) ought to obtain a copy of the software so that they can tell us, conclusively and beyond a shadow of a doubt, if it's legit or not (er, well, at least as much as is possible given the nature of the internet - I suppose there's always the possibility of man-in-the-middle altering of downloaded software - the latter is one of those cases of "a little bit of information is a dangerous thing"
in my case).
So the question still stands.
I'm worn out and tired from searching - I've spent a good solid hour-plus digging around trying to find more into on this, so I'm giving up and posting this question here. It is relevant to NIS 2009 and this forum because of the possibility of someone getting pirated/altered/modified software if such sites aren't legit, and then the person would blame Norton for problems if the software misbehaves.
Personally, these days I wouldn't buy from a non-Norton site (nowadays, if for some reason I couldn't get it from Digital River or whatever the official Norton download site is now, I'd just buy a boxed version in the store instead), but other people (newbies, etc.) might be tempted to buy supposedly-Norton software from non-Norton sites just to save a few bucks, and having accurate official info might save them from being scammed.
*If* it's a scam. If not, well, I guess I'm just way uber-paranoid, and my apologies to whoever might need apologized to; maybe Norton needs to make it easier for us mere mortals (normal users) to find out these things. Like, for instance, making the Partner program search page work right, so that we can look things up. As I said above, that search page was totally useless.
- More confused now than when I started
(but still a very happy NIS 2009 user )
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Reason for edits:
Trying to fix links