The Office Depot case is a cautionary tale

The Office Depot case is a cautionary tale

By Michelle Singletary

The fear of being hacked was allegedly the hook used by Office Depot, its subsidiary OfficeMax, and a California tech-support vendor to dupe customers into paying for computer repairs and technical services they didn’t need, according to the Federal Trade Commission.

Although not admitting any wrongdoing, Office Depot and Support.com Inc. have agreed to pay $35 million to settle the claim they deceived customers into believing their computers were infected with malware and vulnerable to other security threats.

The FTC alleged that from at least 2009 to late 2016, the companies would offer customers a free “PC Health Check Program” to determine if their computers had any performance problems.

But the real purpose was to aggressively sell diagnostic and repair services to customers that, in many cases, they didn’t need, according to Claire Wack, the FTC’s lead attorney on the case.

Read the full article here.

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Disclaimer:  This article is provided for informational purposes only. It’s not legal advice, and no attorney-client relationship is created. Neither the author nor FTC Guardian, Inc. is endorsed by the Federal Trade Commission.

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