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Office Depot and Tech Support Firm Will Pay $35 Million to Settle FTC


David H. Lipman

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Office Depot and Tech Support Firm Will Pay $35 Million to Settle FTC Allegations That They Tricked Consumers into Buying Costly Computer Repair Services

 

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Office Depot, Inc. and a California-based tech support software provider have agreed to pay a total of $35 million to settle Federal Trade Commission allegations that the companies tricked customers into buying millions of dollars’ worth of computer repair and technical services by deceptively claiming their software had found malware symptoms on the customers’ computers.

Office Depot has agreed to pay $25 million while its software supplier, Support.com, Inc., has agreed to pay $10 million as part of their settlements with the FTC. The FTC intends to use these funds to provide refunds to consumers.

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The Office Depot companies marketed the program as a free “PC check-up” or tune-up service to help improve a computer’s performance and scan for viruses and other security threats. Support.com, which received tens of millions of dollars in revenue from Office Depot, remotely performed the tech repair services once consumers made the purchase.

The FTC alleges that while Office Depot claimed the program detected malware symptoms on consumers’ computers, the actual results presented to consumers were based entirely on whether consumers answered “yes” to four questions they were asked at the beginning of the PC Health Check program. These included questions about whether the computer ran slow, received virus warnings, crashed often, or displayed pop-up ads or other problems that prevented the user from browsing the Internet.

The complaint alleges that Office Depot and Support.com configured the PC Health Check Program to report that the scan found malware symptoms or infections whenever consumers answered yes to at least one of these four questions, despite the fact that the scan had no connection to the “malware symptoms” results. After displaying the results of the scan, the program also displayed a “view recommendation” button with a detailed description of the tech services consumers were encouraged to purchase—services that could cost hundreds of dollars—to fix the problems.

 

 

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