San Francisco, California - As if a hungry fee and automatic installation of a crypto miner on user's PCs weren't enough, Norton Antivirus has also opened the crypto trading door to users who might not know very much about the risks of cryptocurrencies.

Norton Antivirus now auto-installs its very own built-in cryptocurrency mining function to the 360 Suite, called Norton Crypto, which still needs users to manually turn Norton Crypto on before it starts mining Ethereum.

There are a couple of legitimate frustrating aspects to Norton's crypto mining feature, such as slapping users with exorbitant fees, made all the worse because those users already paid for the program in the first place.

According to testing done by The Verge, running Norton Crypto can actually lead to zero profits, thanks to Norton skimming off 15% of any mined cryptocurrency in return for running the mining pool it opts your system into.

The mining pool is just a collection of PCs that all work together, and get a portion of the cryptocurrency they managed to mine.

The Verge's test let Norton Crypto mine all night on their PC's high-end RTX 3060 Ti graphics card, and barely broke even, earning $0.66 and paying $0.66 for power, with Norton ending up with all the profits.

Norton made quite a splash by deciding to add a mining feature to an Antivirus suite specifically designed to protect users who don't tend to spend loads of time getting to know the ins-and-outs of tech gadgetry.

This opens the door to them running up electricity costs, like in The Verge's all-night mining attempt, without actually netting any profits, because all the Ethereum they manage to mine is needed to just break even.

Plus, this is also the gateway to the unregulated, risky world of crypto trading, which is extremely unforgiving to users, and has an atrocious track history of attracting scammers who look to rip off traders.

In an ideal world, using your PC's idle time to make some money would be a lovely side hustle, but with Norton's extremely opportunistic business model for Norton Crypto, this is just a demonstration of how not to do it.

Norton Crypto is a prime example of a service taking advantage of both the hyped-up cryptocurrency scene and users who might not be aware of how financially risky crypto can be.