Manycam is Arguably Malware

I’m planting this post as googlebait to protect people who may install a piece of software called Manycam. Manycam is software to combine multiple feeds into a video stream. Maybe this post will be interesting to ordinary blog readers, maybe not. I didn’t find a good centralized location to share warnings like this, so I’m hoping search engines will help out.

I tried it out in hopes of using my Android phone as an IP camera embedded in a recorded presentation at the same time as a slide deck, then recording them together. It was way too buggy to use – for example the IP camera feature couldn’t see my IP camera or load the presentation file – so I uninstalled it.

I wasn’t able to get a refund without complaining to Paypal. Their customer service promised but failed, and the site tried for days, again and again, to charge my credit card.

On uninstalling the software on OS X by dragging it to the trash I found that it remained attached to video conferencing tools like Zoom, posting up an ad in my video feed.

After complaining to support they provided instructions to drag it to the trash, which has no benefit, or to install it all over again and *then* drag it to the trash, and incidentally enclosed a shell script to do the uninstall. It had a small bug in it but was not outright malicious, so I fixed the bug. Here are the steps to remove it using Terminal:

find_exec="sudo rm -rf" sudo find /tmp -iname "*manycam*" -depth -print -exec $find_exec "{}" ; sudo find /System/Library/Extensions -iname "*manycam*" -depth -print -exec $find_exec "{}" ; sudo find /Library/Extensions -iname "*manycam*" -depth -print -exec $find_exec "{}" ; sudo find /Library/CoreMediaIO/Plug-Ins -iname "*manycam*" -depth -print -exec $find_exec "{}" ; sudo find /Library/LaunchDaemons -iname "*manycam*" -depth -print -exec $find_exec "{}" ; sudo find /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/HAL -iname "*manycam*" -depth -print -exec $find_exec "{}" ; sudo find /Applications -iname "*manycam*" -depth -print -exec $find_exec "{}" ; sudo find /Library/QuickTime -iname "*manycam*" -depth -print -exec $find_exec "{}" ; sudo find /Library/Graphics -iname "*manycam*" -depth -print -exec $find_exec "{}" ; sudo find /Library/Compositions -iname "*manycam*" -depth -print -exec $find_exec "{}" ;