Office Depot to Pay $25 Million to FTC to Settle Bogus Tech Support Scam

Office Depot and a California-based tech support software provider, Support.com will pay $25 Million & $10 Million respectively to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for pushing innocent users into buying the products they didn’t need.
According to a recent FTC press release, the agency will use the entire settlement amount to issue refunds to the customersimpacted by the treacherous Tech Support Scam cascaded by Office Depot & Support.com.

Office Deport Help

The devious practices of Office Depot were exposed by Jesse Jones’ undercover investigation, a renowned news personality from Kiro 7 News Channel.
Joe Simons, the Chairman of FTC said that protecting the computers from malware, virus & other cyber threats is an arduous task for the customers. Further, he added that a case like this should send a strong message to the companies that swindling the usersinto buying expensive services they do not need can lead to severe consequences.

Insight into the Devious Tech Support Scam

Office Deport & Support.com altogether generated a colossal amount of millions of US dollars by allegedly tricking their users. They swindled users to pay huge amounts for computer repair & technical services by triggering fake malware scans.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission in its complaint asserts that Support.com in cooperation with Office Deport sold its extortionate technical support services for around 10 years. They used PC Health Check, a software program to persuade the clients to purchase tech repair services from Office Depot & OfficeMaz Inc, which merged in the year 2013.
Office Depot companies marketed PC Health Check as a free PC check-up service that can effectively improve a computer’s performance & detect viruses, Trojans & other security threats.

Office Depot 2

Some reports revealed that Office Depot employees were asked to use PC Health Check software to show malware infection on the user’s PC. Following this deceptive malware detection, the employees would offer the repair the “affected” computers through tech repair services that would incur some extra charges. The purchase of software & tech repair services generated millions of dollars in revenue for Support.com.
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