Office Depot employees have been selling unnecessary tech repair services after telling customers that their laptops and computers were infected with malware, reporters from Seattle TV station KIRO 7 said this week after being tipped off by a former employee.
The whistleblower told KIRO 7 reporters that Office Depot employees were forced by internal procedures to run a PC diagnostics scan known as PC Health Check.
The procedure would, in most cases, return results that appeared to show a malware infection on the user's PC. Here, Office Depot employees would intervene with a sales pitch, offering to repair the computers, an operation that incurred additional charges of $180 or higher.
Employees had daily quotas for PC repair services
Store managers handed employees daily quotas of the number of PC Health Check scans they were supposed to run and kept track of how many PC repair services employees secured.
KIRO 7 reporters tested the whistleblower's claims by taking six out-of-the-box computers to Office Depot centers in both Washington and Oregon. Office Depot employees diagnosed four of the six laptops with a malware infection and offered the reporter to fix it for an extra charge.
To validate Office Depot's PC Health Check scan, reporters took the same laptops to IOActive, a Seattle-based security firm. IOActive's employees said that none of the laptops had any traces of malware.
The PC Health Check scan was rigged
The former Office Depot employee, named Shane Barnett, claims that the sales person running the PC Health Check scan is supposed to ask the customer four questions about strange popups, slow operating speeds, virus warnings and random shutdowns.
Barnett said that if the user answers positively to any of the questions, the scan would show a positive result.
Reporters tracked down the makers of the PC Health Check scanner to the same company behind Support.com, a PC health scanning service. In 2013 Support.com and partner AOL agreed to pay $8 million to settle a class-action lawsuit filed after plaintiffs accused the company of pushing scareware and tricking users into buying PC repair software they didn't need.
Two days after the KIRO 7 unmasked Office Depot's practices, the store chain suspended its PC Health Check scanning procedures.
Senator Maria Cantwell’s office also wrote a letter to the FTC and asked the agency to investigate Office Depot's practices.
Comments
25dollarsupport - 7 years ago
Yes I do agree with this Tech Scam, I know many of my customer taking there computer and then getting pissed off with heavy bills these people are real scam and there is no way they will refund your money.
Demonslay335 - 7 years ago
I've had numerous customers go there for the "free diagnosis and checkup" with just a simple issue, then bring it to me not booting after what ever the heck they did to it. We do track billable of our technicians, but we do not push un-needed services on customers. We have enough legitimate business to keep everyone busy with resorting to such low tactics. We don't rely on one diagnostic program with check boxes to tell us what service is needed, we use the scientific method and actually test the thing the right way... The way these big box stores do it is just scam-worthy in a lot of cases. They hire unqualified people who don't understand computers, and just have them run a program with one procedure and a script to follow. Thats not how you do proper customer service, especially with how varied the IT industry is.
25dollarsupport - 7 years ago
but your diagnostic program is a scareware
Sintharius - 7 years ago
ID Ransomware? Hardly.
Wolfnet - 7 years ago
I see the same thing every day. I worked for Staples as their tech for a year back in 2007 and they were doing similar crap running a custom-built Norton tool that would always show a few "issues" that we were supposed to up-sell a fix for. The worst part was their ONLY approved method of doing virus removal was to run the same tool that had about a 1 in 5 success rate. Otherwise you had to sell them a wipe/restore/data transfer package for about $150.
It's tactics like this that give the rest of us a bad name when all we want to do is fix peoples computers for a reasonable price.
SuperSapien64 - 7 years ago
I used to use the Staples free service scan but I soon realized that there scanner wasn't worth the time. I instead went to my local computer repair shop where they actually take the time to look at your computer and figure out if something is wrong with it or not.