
Office Depot computer scans gave fake results - minimaxir
https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/blog/2019/03/office-depot-computer-scans-gave-fake-results
======
mabbo
I don't understand this... If I as an individual did the same actions, I would
be charged with fraud. I might even serve time in prison for it.

In this company, someone up the chain of command knew they were doing this.
Someone at some point was presented with "we'll give them fake scan results to
upsell our services" and said "yes".

Why is that person not being charged with fraud, just like I would have been?
What makes it just a fine and a slap in the wrist just because they're a big
company?

~~~
mikeash
Smart modern companies arrange it so that upper management never has that sort
of moment. They break the law by setting up perfectly legal incentives and
requirements that just happen, by their combined effects, to encourage or even
require the minions to break the law. At no point is this ever acknowledged,
and there is almost always a clear written policy stating that employees are
expected to obey all relevant laws and regulations. This ensures that, when
systematic fraud like this is uncovered, there is nobody to take
responsibility and nobody has to go to jail, or at least nobody who matters.

~~~
BucketSort
The ability to make accountability disappear seems to be one of the greatest
tricks we've learned in modern society. You hit the nail on the head, this
idea of setting an environment where criminal behavior is emergent is a great
trick. If you do it right and the emergent behavior is revealed, you will
always have the defense of "I did not intend for this to happen," deferring
blame to complexity and other things outside one's control. Is there a
handbook or something that outlines these types of tactics?

~~~
Nasrudith
I don't think it is all that modern - see the infamous "rid me of this
turbulent priest". As for a handbook likely not as it would be what turns a
perfect crime to a convictible one.

~~~
BucketSort
In the old days a master was responsible for those under him. People were
owned, they were not viewed as people with their own agency. Anything bad they
did was treated as a sign that their master failed in disciplining them
properly. With the increasing complexity of organizations, this idea of a high
level boss bearing the entire responsibility for all of his underlings becomes
unreasonable. We also have a different view of individuality now -- this
particular development is modern. So I attribute this disappearing act of
accountability to the increasing complexity of things and perhaps too much
faith in individual autonomy. But I agree that people have always naturally
tried to make accountability disappear, it's just that we are really really
good at it now and the world is often too complicated to come to the bottom of
any matter efficiently.

~~~
TheCoelacanth
If organizations are too complex to hold someone accountable for their
actions, then perhaps those organizations are too complex to allow to exist.

~~~
Nasrudith
Good in principles for avoiding self creation of abusable situations but I'm
not sure about in practice.

The problem is complexity creep really and there is little serious effort in
"code maintenance". The law itself demonstrates such problems. The Justinian
Code was one example of a famously successful refactoring and ironically its
creator despite his talent was also very corrupt.

One ancient solution which probably wouldn't scale well with needed complexity
was "reading of the laws" \- a periodic reading aloud of all laws on the books
and if any were forgotten and went unobjected to they were automatically
repealed as essentially irrelevant.

Just hard limiting complexity isn't a very good solution given increased
complexity of the world and scale it often ammounts to "if I can't understand
it ban it". It is populistic and anti-intellectual and a bit of a meme - that
what can be easily understood is better and what can't is worse. Except
reality doesn't work that way - the main reason why we bother with extra
complexity and difficult to understand fields is because it works better.

Needless complexity may be a good concept to define abusability but defining
it is tricky just like pinning down Hollywood accounting - where do you
formally draw the line between overmarketing and intentionally torpedoing
profit margins without proof of intent?

~~~
dllthomas
Maybe no hard cap, but a soft one imposed by way of criminal liability up the
chain for a pattern of illegal behavior at the bottom, even where the higher-
ups didn't know and purportedly didn't intend it. Complexity and missing
accountability and controls is then a direct personal threat to decision
makers. Of course, we'd probably get bigger cover-ups.

------
iFred
AHAHAHAHA!

About time. One of my first tech jobs was with Office Depot, where I was hired
on as the technology lead, thinking that I was going to be sharing my 2008 era
knowledge. I still remember feeling excited and sharing with the store my
first laptop sale, explaining how I was able to sell a Windows Vista Basic
machine with a copy of Windows XP and a stick of memory. My boss was quick to
tell me that they don't make any money on that stuff and selling high end
items with the amount of time that I spent doing that sale was actually
hurting the store. So I could either lose my job or sell extended warranties
and services, and earn 5-10 dollars a sale. I was 20 years old, wanted a new
iPhone, and was living with my parents, so my path was pretty clear.

At Office Depot, we had two kinds of warranties, either a "Kit" or a stand
alone warranties. With services, we had the "make your computer faster" and
"so you just bought this pos, lets make it faster". With warranties, I went
straight for the scare tactics, such as your printer ink cartridges could leak
all over over or the new chair you bought could have a castor leak grease,
both of these were not covered under the normal warranty, but for 25-100
dollars, you could be protected from the unpredictable. With services, we just
put your new computer on a cabinet where we ran a flash program that showed
"vulnerabilities", and for 100 dollars, we could patch up this machine that
would have been hacked to shreds by the Chinese if it were not for us brave
souls.

I made two grand that month and was given an award by the Office Depot
district manager. I felt like shit too. I was able to get my conscience back
after helping people under the table when they bought one of our bullshit
comfort blankets and wouldn't anything other than the shredder kit - which
included a bottle of literal synthetic snake oil.

~~~
DoofusOfDeath
Thanks for sharing that story. Although I'm a little surprised that you eased
your conscience by (IIUC) committing tax fraud.

~~~
iFred
It was all for free.

~~~
DoofusOfDeath
> It was all for free.

Awesome. You used the term "under the table", which I've always understood to
mean a cash transaction that won't be reported in tax filings.

~~~
jacquesm
'Under the table' means 'out of sight'. It is used to indicate money changing
hands but that's not the only use.

~~~
cabaalis
Every single time I've heard "under the table" it means "without
documentation" and is used in the sense of not paying taxes.

------
spectramax
Office Depot, Staples, Office Max : These stores need to die. I’ve never felt
worse by stepping into these stores without some clerk coming up to me about
up selling this kind a bullshit.

They’re old relics that need to die like Sears did. They’re not innovating,
they’re getting desperate as we’ve seen RadioShack in early 2000’s leading up
to its bankruptcy in 2015.

Furthermore, they pay poorly to their employees, and there is a whole bunch of
toxicity in there. Best Buy was on its way on the same path but they’ve saved
themselves by a narrow margin. I still despise their “Geek Squad”. They take
advantage of uninformed consumers and it’s sleezy. It makes me angry just
thinking about it.

The leaders and executives that run these businesses are completely and
utterly out of touch with their core business values, innovation and having a
vision for the company. Spineless bozos.

~~~
grawprog
I've never had a good experience in Staples. I really try. Every time I go in
I think it will be different. It never is. I don't know why I do it. They're
just really close and handy for those odd things. It just never ends well. The
last time i went in was for pens. It ended with me arguing with a security
guard who decided i'd been looking at the pens too long. He stood there
yelling at me while I purchased my pens, threatening to call the police...i'm
still not sure why...and the cashier was trying his best to be polite and
completely uninvolved.

~~~
PakG1
Sometimes it feels like you can have someone who takes their job extremely
seriously to a fault or someone who couldn't care less and lets everything bad
happen, no way to have someone right in the Goldilocks zone.

~~~
grawprog
Yeah, pretty sure that's was what it was. It was pretty quiet in there. As
soon as I walked in the security guard started following me. He asked me
immediately what I was doing there and what I wanted...I said pens, so he
escorted me to the pens aisle,.stood there for a bit getting impatient before
telling me to hurry up. I said straight up to him that if he was suspicious of
me and wanted to watch me fine, but not to sit there and tell me to hurry up.
That was when he started yelling.

He never really did anything just stood there and yelled. I just kind of
ignored him at that point. I found the pens I wanted and he followed me back
to the register. That was when the threats of calling the cops came.

I dunno, I could understand if I'd looked or acted shady or something. But I
was on my way home from work, dressed reasonably, shaved and groomed and all
that.

~~~
fivefive55
I would have told him to call the cops honestly. What are they going to do?
You've done nothing wrong, in fact, you're the victim of harassment. In a just
world they would ream out the idiot security guard for wasting police
resources.

~~~
grawprog
I did...several times and laughed at him and asked what he planned to tell
them i'd done. By that point, i was feeling fairly adversarial and was in the
process of purchasing the needed pens, so i stopped giving a shit. He didn't
have an answer for that but he pulled his phone out and everything just,
didn't dial for some reason.

I even told him i'd wait for them to show up and we could all have a nice
talk. By that point, the cashier had finished, he'd made no move to call so i
left. He kinda followed me to the door and just stood there while i walked
away.

I feel kinda bad for the cashier. He was young, looked like a highschool
student or something. He looked really uncomfortable and really tried his best
to be completely uninvolved. I was extremely polite with him. Told him to have
a good evening and thanked him profusely for the pens. This seemed to anger
the security guard more.

------
ipsin
I feel that the FTC's story leaves a few things to be desired. Here's a
timeline:

1) Circa 2009, scammy "PC Diagnosis" scam starts.

2) Feb 2012, class action filed against Support.com for scareware up-selling a
subscription service. [1]

3) Nov 2016, two TV affiliates run similar tests finding they're ripping off
customers. [2]

4) Nov 2016, Office Depot discontinues the scam.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Support.com](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Support.com)

[2] [https://www.pcmag.com/news/349821/office-depot-caught-
sellin...](https://www.pcmag.com/news/349821/office-depot-caught-selling-
fixes-for-non-existent-pc-prob)

I feel like this could use a postmortem more than what feels like a
congratulatory press release.

I'd be curious to know if there were complaints filed with the FTC prior to
November 2016.

------
busterarm
I used to work for Support.com in a senior technical role during part this
window of time, but not directly on the Office Depot tenant.

Support.com followed similar practices of other scanning software like MBAM
(MalwareBytes) and SAS (Super Anti Spyware) at the time. In fact, Support.com
acquired Super Anti Spyware.

The big problems were:

a) their staff is incredibly poorly trained, mostly because they barely pay
above minimum wage to these workers, their training barely covers more than
the UI of their tools and they're pushed on resolution time. These workers
don't have much skill and don't have much reason to care. They basically don't
know the difference between spyware/adware and infections.

b) Office Depot was upselling this on brand new computers which are bundled
with loads of adware. Effectively they were telling customers that their brand
new computers were infected.

Support.com is an incredibly stupid company who repeatedly hired their
business development people from failed companies (ex-Radio Shack, CompUSA and
Circuit City hires were the rule, not the exception). That said, they weren't
the only bad actor here.

Also, nobody should be surprised that this company was founded by Mark Pincus
of Zynga fame.

------
kbos87
This brings to mind Home Depot's free "water tests" hanging at the entry to
every store, emblazoned with the Home Depot logo. Free water test! Make sure
what your family drinks and bathes in and cooks with is safe! they say.

The reality is that everyone gets an urgent call from a sales rep about some
vague characteristics of your water that urgently need to be corrected by one
of their $7,000 water softening systems that nobody actually needs. The
salespeople are relentless, they call daily, and insist on finding a time when
"both spouses" will be home to listen to their pitch. I haven't been subjected
to that but I'm sure it doubles their chances of one person caving to their
high pressure sales tactics.

When I first came across this, I was stunned that a big name retailer with a
lot to lose would do something so shady and unethical. I wonder if they even
actually do test the water and would notice or tell you if it was actually
loaded with lead or something else.

~~~
acheron
I have never noticed that, but yeah that sounds sketchy.

(Relevant to your post, if you actually want a water test (in the US), check
with your state's cooperative extension -- they probably offer something
unlikely to be associated with salesmen, e.g. Virginia:
[https://ext.vt.edu/food-health/home-water-
quality.html](https://ext.vt.edu/food-health/home-water-quality.html) )

------
ims
The actual complaint:
[https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/cases/office_depo...](https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/cases/office_depot_complaint_3-27-19.pdf)

------
chrischen
A lot of big brands launder their shady services through secondary service
providers, or indirectly profit off of shady third party service providers.

~~~
cazum
Yep. I worked at a toys r us in high school, and can say that selling toys was
a secondary priority. A sales associates main purpose was to sell extended
warranties offered through some bullshit 3rd party.

I don't know how prevalent this was, but I was trained to lie to customers in
order to sell them. I was told the warranty would cover any damage to products
at all, and 5 months in I finally read the fine print and realized I'd been
used to scam hundreds of people. Quit shortly after.

------
jawns
Can anybody speak to why some of these "deceptive claims" settlements end up
as a settlement with the FTC, which collects and disperses the funds in the
form of refunds, while others end up as a class action settlement, where some
private party sues on behalf of a class?

In a standard class action lawsuit, the lawyers for the plaintiff (if
successful) get a pretty nice cut of the settlement, and the remainder is
dispersed to class members.

But if the settlement is with the FTC, does it get its own cut, or does the
entire settlement amount go out to class members?

------
ams6110
Sears automotive service all over again.

~~~
differentView
What did they do?

~~~
ams6110
Unnecessary repairs.

[https://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/12/business/accusation-of-
fr...](https://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/12/business/accusation-of-fraud-at-
sears.html)

------
turc1656
_" Many of us would gladly take advantage of a free computer tune-up from a
big-name retailer. We wouldn’t suspect the tune-up might be a tech support
scam."_

Funny, that's precisely what I would suspect it was.

------
cazum
How likely do you think it is that the settlement amount is less than the
money made running this scam?

~~~
mttjj
Well the article said that customers were charged ‘up to $300’. Let’s be
conservative and say customers were charged $150 on average. $35 million/$150
= 233,333. So the question is, did they scam more than 233,333 people? I’d bet
so.

~~~
lotsofpulp
The question is what percent of total scams were caught and fined, since for
the people committing them, it’s a total fines / total profit across all scams
calculation. Additionally, the fines come out of company money, and
presumably, executives have a network to fall back on so losing their job
isn’t likely an issue.

------
anonu
This is similar to the VW emissions scandal in reverse.

------
Annatar
Welcome to running Windows on your computer. What a steaming pile of garbage
software is that companies can defraud people like this.

~~~
SmellyGeekBoy
I'm not a Windows user, but pretending that retailers aren't also ripping off
Mac users using similar tactics is just dishonest.

~~~
Forbo
A big selling point of this scam is the "tune-up" to disable the loads of
bundled crapware that comes preinstalled from OEMs. How much bundled crapware
comes preloaded in a Mac?

~~~
brokenmachine
itunes?

~~~
Annatar
Not funny.

~~~
brokenmachine
Yes, it's just sad.

~~~
Annatar
No it isn't. You're just bashing itunes because you believe it's good to bash
Apple Computer. That's just dumb, not to mention a huge waste of time, time
which you will never get back.

~~~
brokenmachine
No, I've used itunes. It's sad.

~~~
Annatar
I've used them too. Clunky but they worked just fine, the music got
transported between my Apple laptop and my Apple telephone. What's the
problem?

~~~
brokenmachine
I haven't used any recent versions for obvious reasons but the interface was
horrific and it had all kinds of odd connection issues.

I was only using it to help someone who couldn't work out how to do something
really basic, just get music from their PC to their phone or whatever.

It felt to me like Apple was deliberately making things overly difficult to
force less-patient people into their ecosystem of paying for songs on every
device separately and not downloading drm-free mp3s that you actually own.
This was a long time ago.

I was left thinking that there's no way a billion-dollar company could put out
something this unintuitive and shitty unless they had an ulterior motive.

I forget the details but it was super painful and I will lead a happier life
if I never have to deal with it again.

------
microdrum
It seems absolutely insane that the FTC is going after Office Depot for this.
. . .and not $100B+ illegal collusory and monopolistic activity of Google’s
Doubleclick server, AdWords sales, and AdExchange intermediation businesses.
It’s like the FTC has time traveled to 2019 from 1959. This can’t go on
forever.

~~~
55555
Judging from the downvotes you need to be more clear why you believe their
activity (which specifically?) is illegal and monopolistic

~~~
mikestew
Judging from the downvotes, one might do well to learn the concept of “on
topic”. I don’t give a shit about Google, but whataboutism is a sure fire way
to earn some down arrows.

