The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced that Office Depot, along with a tech support firm, must come up with $35 million to settle a lawsuit over claims that both organizations were part of a computer repair service scam, which involved a fake malware scan.

Inthe FTC complaint, it was stated that Office Depot, OfficeMax, and Support.comran a program called PC Health Check. This program is designed to search formalware on a customer’s computer. However, it actually doesn’t quite do that.Instead, it gives the customer a questionnaire, and then it uses the answersgiven by the respondent to flag some malware…even though malware might not haveeven been on the computer.

Someof the questions asked by the PC Health Check program included asking if thecomputer was slow, if it had a lot of pop-up ads, or if it crashed a lot. Whenthe person clicked “yes,” to these questions, the software prompted them to buyfixes for the issues, which could cost hundreds of dollars.

Additionally,the complaint alleges that Office Depot and OfficeMax told their storeemployees to run PC Health Check on every computer that was brought into thestore. In total, it is estimated that there were tens of millions of dollarslost in this scam.

Ontop of this, it is alleged that this scheme went on from 2009 until late 2016.It was only stopped when KIRO 7, a CBS-affiliate, began looking into it afterviewers started reporting complaints about the program. Employees were alsoupset, and the FTC shared an incident from 2012 in its report. It said that anemployee complained to upper management and said that they could not keep“lying to a customer” or be subject to being “tricked into lying” just so theirstore could “make a few extra dollars.”

Ifall of this wasn’t enough, the complaint also alleges that Office Depot advisedits stores to never run a PC Health Check on any computer that had beenrepaired, because the program would still report malware, even though there wasnone on the machine. In other words, Office Depot knew that the program wouldflag malware even if there wasn’t malware on the computer.

Because of this scam, Office Depot will have to pay $25 million and Support.com must pay $10 million to settle with the FTC. The agency says that it will use the money to repay people who were victims of this scheme. Joe Simons, FTC Chairman, said in a statement that this should “send a strong message” to any other companies that might be considering this type of deception to trick people into buying services that they might not really need.

Robert Siciliano personal security and identity theft expert and speaker is the author of Identity Theft Privacy: Security Protection and Fraud Prevention: Your Guide to Protecting Yourself from Identity Theft and Computer Fraud. See him knock’em dead in this Security Awareness Training video.