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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: 4, Informative) by Booga1 on Friday March 29 2019, @05:47PM (2 children)
It goes far beyond employee training. The software was such an obvious scam that some employees refused to participate in such a ridiculous fraud.
On top of that, the stores even warned employees to NOT re-scan the computer after everything was "fixed" because they knew it would just find "new" problems.
Even better was the sting operation from the same news station that gave them brand new in-the-box computers that had never been connected to the internet. The software still found "problems" that needed "repair." They demonstrated some of the software and it had some vague questions like, "do you receive pop up windows that block your web browsing?" and "does your computer seem slower lately?" If ANY checkbox was selected, the software would report "signs of malware infection" and would recommend "repairs" that were pretty pricey($189-$300).
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Friday March 29 2019, @06:20PM (1 child)
That isn't so far-fetched. I'll recount my wife's first purchase of a computer. One of the original Athlon, offered by Compaq, for an attractive price at the time. She got it delivered, opened it up, and set it up. It had a few odd icons, for pre-installed stuff. One of those icons was a black raven, or crow, that helped her to connect to some gaming platform on the web. "Gaming platform" in this case meant all the cool little old-lady games, like a hundred versions of solitaire, some eye-candy crap similar to Angry Birds (Angry Birds didn't exist at the time, but rather similar stuff did.) I think there was a Tetris-like - all sorts of stuff.
But, the computer ran like crap. I've mentioned a couple of times that at the same time, I built a Super Socket Six machine, with a 450mhz mobile, and one full gig of PC 150 memory. My 450 (overclocked slightly - stable at about 480 mhz) ran Windows XP better and more smoothly than her 1 ghz Athlon. More, her Athlon got slower and slower. When she FINALLY permitted me to touch her new shiny, I quickly learned that the little black raven was the (primary) source of her problems. Some sources flat out stated that the program was in and of itself malware. Other sources had more benign sounding terms for it, but all agreed it was a true resource hog. The various crap that the raven's game platform fed to your machine was often pure malware.
So, yeah, if the PC builder is willing to whore itself to the malware distributors, you'll have malware on a brand new machine that has never connected to the internet.
Oh - even worse, if you uninstalled the game thing, Windows would just restore it automagically. I ended up nuking from orbit, and installing a pirated version of XP for her.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 29 2019, @06:41PM
Here is This Morning's coverage of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cEfYibkHjM [youtube.com]
The computers were clean, according to IO Active, which is one of the bigger corporate security firms, and they said all of the machines were clean. Well, except for the one right out of the box from another Office Depot, which then raises the issue of why OD is either faking issues not there or recklessly selling computers with issues.