Victims of Office Depot’s Fake Malware Scan Scam Get Paid

Last spring the FTC brought the hammer down on Office Depot to the tune of $35 million. The offense: tricking users into thinking their computers were infected with malware and charging for unnecessary services.

It was something straight out of the fakeAV/tune-up app distributor’s playbook. The difference, of course, is that it’s exactly the sort of thing you expect from opportunistic cybercriminals but not so much from one of the largest office supply brands in North America.

That’s exactly what went down, though, according to the FTC. It all started with this innocuous-looking screen:

Looks official enough, right? As you can see from the FTC’s addition to the image, the same unsettling diagnosis was returned regardless of the victim’s problem report. Sure, two of the options are telltale signs of (at worst) malware or (at best) potentially unwanted program activity. The other two, however, could have a number of different causes… and automatically reporting ad infection because a user checked one is just plain evil.

The FTC said that complaints had been made by technicians as far back as 2012, but the shady software was still being used four years later. When the smoke cleared, Office Depot was on the hook for $25 million while Support.com (who provided the “health check” app) forked over an additional $10 million.

This week, the FTC started sending out payments to the victims — more than 540,000 of them. They’ll be receiving checks for an average of $63.35.

Some were hit much harder than others by the scam. The FTC reported that some of those who were scammed paid for “hundreds of dollars” of unneeded services as a result of the app-powered deception.

As someone who put in a lot of hours helping customers remove real malware from their computers, I can’t imagine what it would’ve been like to have management encouraging me to use a tool like this to juice sales. It’s downright twisted, and hopefully the FTC-issued refunds bring some much-needed closure to the victims.

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