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from the who-knew-Office-Depot-was-still-around? dept.
Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984
Office Depot and a partner company tricked customers into buying unneeded tech support services by offering PC scans that gave fake results, according to the Federal Trade Commission. Consumers paid up to $300 each for unnecessary services.
The FTC yesterday announced that Office Depot and its software supplier, Support.com, have agreed to pay a total of $35 million in settlements with the agency. Office Depot agreed to pay $25 million while Support.com will pay the other $10 million. The FTC said it intends to use the money to provide refunds to wronged consumers.
Between 2009 and 2016, Office Depot and OfficeMax offered computer scans inside their stores using a "PC Health Check" software application created and licensed by Support.com.
"Defendants bilked unsuspecting consumers out of tens of millions of dollars from their use of the PC Health Check program to sell costly diagnostic and repair services," the FTC alleged in a complaint that accuses both companies of violating the FTC Act's prohibition against deceptive practices. As part of the settlements, neither company admitted or denied the FTC's allegations.
The FTC filed its complaint against the companies in US District Court for the Southern District of Florida, while at the same time unveiling the settlements with each company.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bob_super on Friday March 29 2019, @05:27PM (3 children)
Who's going to jail for this organized fraud ?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 29 2019, @05:56PM (1 child)
jail is only for the little people
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 29 2019, @06:14PM
mhmm. jail is for housing the excess labor pool, not the jerb creators
those proles should be happy! we're spending $100,000 per year on each of those ungrateful slobs! you think starving kids in china get to eat nutriloaf?!
(Score: 3, Informative) by Revek on Friday March 29 2019, @11:17PM
They made it hard to remove their crap software also. I often had to boot a rescue disk and delete the files. They weren't the only ones though. All of them used their crap software for fund raising, including Symantec. I walked into a insurance office one day to pay a bill and one of their 'techs' was attempting to scam them into paying four hundred dollars a PC to 'clean' the machines. He was on the machine remotely and had re sorted the event viewer by critical warnings so the customer saw only red. They couldn't download the client to reinstall. It was timing out. I remoted into a machine at my office and the link symantec gave started downloading immediately. I can only infer from this that symantec was blocking their machines so they had trouble installing the new client. They knew I was tech so they asked me what to do I told them we need to unplug the cable modem and remove their remote control software. I enjoyed giving the symantec guy crap on the phone while I was removing their garbage. I really made fun of him until he hung up. We replaced their anti virus and moved on. Scams like this are still ongoing. Most are from overseas scam farms who we let have US numbers. They are fun to mess with I've often gave them remote access to a VPS install. The beauty of it is I get to watch them and learn how they operate. I don't clean machines daily anymore but I'm sure the scams go on.
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