From KIRO news: “Office Depot agreed yesterday to pay $25 million in a settlement with the US Federal Trade Commission as part of a lawsuit accusing the company of tricking customers into buying unneeded tech support services –akin to a real-world version of online tech support scam sites.
Support.com, a PC health scanning service also named in the lawsuit, also agreed to pay an additional $10 million, which the FTC said it would use to refund impacted customers.
At the heart of the FTC investigation was Office Depot’s PC Health Check, a PC diagnostics service that Office Depot was offering to run on computers brought into stores by customers for routine checks and repairs.
The PC Health Check service required employees to ask customers four questions about strange popups, slow operating speeds, virus and malware warnings, and PC crashes or freezes.
The FTC says that checking any of the four options as part of Office Depot’s PC Health Check questionnaire would automatically trigger a positive malware scan result.
Office Depot employees would then step in to offer PC clean-up services for $180 or higher.