Office Depot Settles, After FTC Alleges “PC Health Check” Scam

Office Depot and a California computer technical support company teamed up to dupe office max customers into buying computer clean-up procedures they didn’t need, according to an FTC complaint . To settle the matter, the companies have agreed to pay $35 million, of which $25 million will come from Office Depot and $10 million from the tech support company, California-based Support.com, Inc. “The FTC intends to use these funds to provide refunds to consumers,” according to a March 17 FTC press release that lays out terms of the settlement and the Commission’s take on the case. The sales program persisted for years, according to the FTC, with employees encouraged to promote it with various incentives and despite warnings to management from some employees who weren’t happy with it. The matter was first aired by Seattle-area tv station in a 2016 expose, referenced in the FTC complaint as “a series of investigative reports about the tech service divisions of Office Depot stores in Washington and Oregon that were flagging malware or malware symptoms on computers that were, unbeknownst to the stores, brand new and straight out of the box.”