Office Depot computer scans gave fake results | Hacker News Reader

Office Depot computer scans gave fake results

consumer.ftc.gov

281 pointsminimaxir135 comments

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?

> What makes it just a fine and a slap in the wrist just because they're a big company?

Yes ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsplLiZHbj0 )

I initially avoided that Dirty Money series because I thought it was going to be just another surface level rage bait documentary - like so many "finance" documentaries have been since the great recession. But it was very well done and had high information content.

I wasn't surprised to learn it was from the same director as The Smartest Guys in the Room (Enron Documentary). Bethany McLean even makes an appearance.

Most likely support.com sold office depot on this and operated it to give them a cut of the proceeds.

Someone should go to jail. I suppose they still may - the FTC only has civil authority, but they often refer cases to the FBI for criminal prosecution once they have their pound of flesh on the civil side. The government has criminally charged people involved in these kinds of cases - the most notable of cases can be viewed here [1]. But because Office Depot is a large company, it seems nobody will suffer real consequences.

[1] https://www.pcmag.com/news/266065/fbi-busts-international-sc...

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.

So just apply a massive fine to the company itself.

All fines come out of executive bonus payments first.

No they don’t. On the contrary executive pay, is often locked in and any fines come out of shareholders bottom lines. If anything, rank and file employee bonuses are the ones that will take a hit as their “bonus” compensation is not guaranteed by contract.

The pays are locked, the bonuses are usually not.

There may be a sign-up bonus (rarely) or a golden parachute (even more rare), but the whole idea of the bonus is to be tied to the company performance.

It seems like there are numerous examples that prove you wrong from Goldman Sachs to PG&E.

Can you elaborate your point about GS, please? I don't think they had a single year of losses, at least since 2006.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GS/goldman-sachs/n...

It was very well covered in the news at the time.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2009/07/31/business/31pay.html

I think simonh was making a proposal rather than a statement of fact.

> 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.

I don't see why this is supposed to be a problem. (Barring "require", but I'm betting you're just exaggerating there.)

Any incentive is going to encourage the incentivized party to break the law. That's the point of the law, protecting some people from what other people want to do to them.

Right now, I'm incentivized to take all your money, because more money is better than less money. And there have been people who saw this fact and decided the problem was the concept of money. But those people were and are insane.

> (Barring "require", but I'm betting you're just exaggerating there.)

I don’t think so. All you need is a simple quota that is too high to be achieved naturally. A common example is credit card signups. The company requires some percentage of a worker’s customers to be signed up for the company card. That percentage is too high to be achieved by honest means. Result: workers lie about the card, get people to fill out the form by saying it’s just a bonus card, or just sign people up without their knowledge.

I’d bet the same sort of thing happened here. They had a quota where a certain percentage of customers who came in for a free diagnostic had to be sold services. The actual percentage of customers who needed work done was lower than that. Result: workers fake the need for service, and executives keep their hands squeaky clean.

> a simple quota that is too high to be achieved naturally

As I recall, Dilbert nailed this one decades ago. "Welcome to sales training. We don't ask you to act illegally, but it's pretty much the only way to reach quota. That's it for training."

It works best at large, high-turnover companies; even if only 10% of the people you hire are willing to break the law, you filter out the honest people pretty quickly. And once fraud is common enough, it becomes culturally accepted, or inescapable via rules like "fire the bottom 20%". Sometimes it even ends up taught as a "best practice" to honest hires who don't know better. Hence credit card signups, hence fake Wells Fargo accounts, hence Comcast assigning reps to upsell on a percentage of all calls, even cancellations and complaints.

Heck, this is pretty much how game dev 'crunch time' works too; it's not scheduled, so there's no one to blame, but development targets get set so that it's a predictable outcome on every project.

The other side is that the principal agent problem is real and people have different skill levels. Some people cheat to meet quotas, other people do it easily, lots fail and call the bluff that they won’t be fired for underachieving.

  Barring "require", but I'm betting
  you're just exaggerating there.

Imagine a delivery company where drivers are given a schedule based on average traffic conditions; and to reward hustle and punish laziness, drivers are fired if they're late too often. It's official policy that drivers should not speed. Sounds reasonable enough, right?

Now imagine a driver for that company who has just been delayed by worse-than-average traffic. Not their fault, a crash caused a tailback. They can speed to get back on schedule, otherwise they'll be fired.

Would you consider it an exaggeration to say the driver had been required to break the law?

I wish more people knew the story about UPS telematics. You're absolutely right, but it's not just speeding. UPS trucks these days have about 200 sensors, covering everything from speed to rear-door position to seatbelt buckled-ness. As I've heard it, the story goes something like this:

UPS set delivery targets for drivers that were too high to consistently achieve. When drivers fell behind, they sped and caused accidents, so UPS installed speed monitoring. Drivers switched to leaving the rear door open between nearby stops, so UPS installed door sensors. Drivers started leaving seatbelts unbuckled, so those got sensors.

UPS essentially frames this as fighting Goodhart's Law with brute force, trying to track so many metrics that they can't be gamed. Except, of course, that the targets aren't realistic. What actually happens are results like drivers sitting on buckled seatbelts, moving heavy packages in injury-causing ways, or marking "signature required" packages as no-shows without knocking to shave off time. None of that is permitted, UPS fires people who are caught doing it, but the rest of the time when it isn't caught, it's all convenient cost-savings.

There's nothing wrong with holding individuals accountable for their response to incentives, but it's possible to do that while also holding people accountable for the incentives they create.

I don’t know about ups drivers, but in many jobs, there is a huge difference in efficiency between workers. the least efficient workers protect the more efficient workers when the bosses want to squeeze the more efficient workers also.

This is a really good point.

My understanding is that UPS has partially bypassed this by setting per-route targets which update independently, but within a multi-driver route it could still apply. FedEx dodged it by franchising so that slow workers outright went into debt to the company, but then got sued on employees-as-contractors grounds. Overall, though, I think it's a huge and underrated effect limiting Taylorism. Designing strictly around efficient workers isn't viable if you can't find a lot of them, and using multiple workflows is rarely cost-effective.

There's a story in Rivethead about a car-assembly stamping job that was assigned to two people splitting tasks, but could be done by one person working very smoothly. New guys would do it in pairs, but experienced workers could each do a half-shift solo and duck out to the bar for the other half. As far as I know, time-motion studies never put an end to that, because it was too scarce a skill to schedule and organize for. (Of course, the inability to squeeze out more productivity has consequences for automation, but that's another story.)

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?

The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli?

Maybe. The art of war may be a good candidate as well. It is all games of power in the end. The only twist in modern dealings is that you have to maintain an identity of innocence while doing nasty things, but I guess deception like this has always been a key part of warfare. We just have a greater focus on the innocence game than ever before. Then again, there has always been questions of piety and alignment with the greater good. Things just look different now, but they are the same old games. It's like we are adding different numbers and claim it to be entirely different from previous calculations, but in the end it's the same game, just different characters.

> Then again, there has always been questions of piety and alignment with the greater good.

The intresting thing is there's no specific source of "piety" in the religiously/ philosophically divided West. Even if someone's moral failings get exposed, currently, every devil has an advocate.

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.

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.

I wonder, is it really an unreasonable standard now, or is it merely an inconvenient one for the people who determine the shape of the system?

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

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?

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.

> In the old days a master was responsible for those under him.

True now, too; notably, by way of the legal doctrine of respondeat superior.

It's worth noting, though, that Henry II was reviled for that remark. It may have replaced a reign-ending crime with a political outrage, but Henry was still barred from mass and otherwise held responsible for a predictable result.

The modern breakthrough seems to be ability to act without any direct action. Indirect communications mean that a speaker doesn't need any connection to the person whose action they're compelling, and mass communications mean that the threshold of explicitness drops from "reasonable person understands" to "someone is crazy enough to take this literally". Math-washing and automated systems make it possible to take a decision you can't explain and apply it to an unknown set of people. The result is everything from Wells Fargo fraud to legal systems that bill suspects for their own wrongful searches.

It's not a new thing, and that's worth remembering, but we seem to have gotten vastly better at it in the last few decades.

The broad concept here certainly isn't new, we could cite everyone from Richelieu to Machiavelli. But I think you're right about the systematic erasure of accountability being a more modern affliction, and I'm tempted to ascribe it to communication and data-handling technology. No matter how circuitous Henry II's "turbulent priest" comment was, he made an open-ended declaration to a specific audience, one loyal to him and full of military men. At best, people could say he ought to have known what would happen. At worst, he implied that inaction was treasonous and so his words had the force of an order. Which is not merely hypothetical; Henry was apparently condemned in his time by people who knew what he'd said.

These days, we've gotten much better at directionless provocations.

'Stochastic terrorism' was coined back in 2011 to describe mass media rhetoric which produces statistically-predictable violence from an unknown source. Where Henry spoke to his court and produced a murder by his knights, someone speaking online or on television can stir violence from someone they've never met, who will quite likely be the sort of person easily written off as "disturbed" or "not behaving rationally". The specific occurrence is accurately dismissed as unpredictable, without admitting that on average such actors will be exposed to the content.

Similarly, giving an employee a target creates an obvious expectation. If you direct someone to triple their sales in a month, they might tell you "I think that's impossible to do legally." If they then do it anyway, you lack plausible deniability even if you didn't instruct them to commit a crime. But today, you can punch a sales target into HR software and assign it, with no feedback channel, to 1,000 employees you'll never meet. Some will break the law, but when the whole thing goes Wells Fargo, you had no reason to know. If employees complain up the chain, the message can disappear or decay "between" layers, with no way to show that any one party knowingly concealed anything.

This seems to happen everywhere conspiracies and fraud used to operate. The "smoke-filled rooms" choosing political nominees get replaced with common-knowledge biases across donors and superdelegates. Price-matching means cartels get replaced with 'independent' but reciprocal high prices. Targeted bribery gets replaced with generalized expectations of favorable laws, post-retirement board seats, and so on. Honestly, the more surprising thing at this point is when people do make these things explicit and get caught.

Well said!!

> Honestly, the more surprising thing at this point is when people do make these things explicit and get caught.

I suppose the effort involved to insulate oneself from liability is eventually seen as an unnecessary burden when one is accustom to getting away with things. I imagine a thief on his first heist who has spent a great deal of time planning and plotting only to find that it was actually quite easy to pull off, the security wasn't nearly as strong as he expected. Maybe on the next heist he is less cautious, and on the next heist even less, until he gets to the point where he's casually strolling in wearing flip-flops and sunglasses and just takes what he wants. Of course this is when he gets caught and the news paper shows this ridiculous image of an offensively cavalier thief who is supposedly a great heister. Then the public is shocked how such a dope could be a great thief (where is his mask and great stealth), but they only know the lazy thief, not the thief when he was disciplined. The lazy or stupid thieves are the ones that get caught.

While this is a cynical thing to say, unfortunately it's rather true in my experience.

When I was younger I briefly worked for Wells Fargo as part of their mortgage pipeline. It was immediately clear to me that their quality control system was deliberately designed to incentivize employee fraud in favor of getting mortgages sold.

See, to me, this isn't that big of a problem. Corporations have in many ways been granted personhood. Besides, as people are saying, sometimes violating the law is more of an emergent property of the corporation rather than the misdeeds of any individual. So, the solution is simple. If the penalty for a multimillion dollar fraud is going to prison for a few years, send the company to prison for a few years.

Maybe one can just refuse to do the implicitly illegal behavior, before they make the illegal policy explicit and which then gets completely repealed.

Sure, and then you’ll get fired for failing to follow perfectly legal policy, or failing to meet perfectly legal goals.

From "Capitalist Realism" by Mark Fisher:

“[I]t is a mistake to rush to impose the individual ethical responsibility that the corporate structure deflects. This is the temptation of the ethical which, as Zizek has argued, the capitalist system is using in order to protect itself in the wake of the credit crisis - the blame will be put on supposedly pathological individuals, those’ abusing the system’, rather than on the system itself. But the evasion is actually a two step procedure - since structure will often be invoked (either implicitly or openly) precisely at the point when there is the possibility of individuals who belong to the corporate structure being punished. At this point, suddenly, the causes of abuse or atrocity are so systemic, so diffuse, that no individual can be held responsible… But this impasse - it is only individuals that can be held ethically responsible for actions, and yet the cause of these abuses and errors is corporate, systemic - is not only a dissimulation: it precisely indicates what is lacking in capitalism. What agencies are capable of regulating and controlling impersonal structures? How is it possible to chastise a corporate structure? Yes, corporations can legally be treated as individuals - but the problem is that corporations, whilst certainly entities, are not like individual humans, and any analogy between punishing corporations and punishing individuals will therefore necessarily be poor. And it is not as if corporations are the deep-level agents behind everything; they are themselves constrained by/expressions of the ultimate cause-that-is-not-asubject: Capital.”

Not that it proposes any answers necessarily. Your post just reminded me of this quote.

It seems to imply the only ethical form of control is through capital directly, so through fines. Though it seems obvious that in such a case others in the company would want to punish the individual who got caught.

There is such a thing as the corporate death penalty: revoking the corporate charter. It is used extremely rarely, the main argument goes something like 'oh, but there are so many people working there who had nothing to do with this' and fines levied typically are much less than the profits gained with the lawless behavior.

Another option I see is that the CEO of a company would be automatically personally held responsible for any wrongdoing. There is of course a lot of stuff you could say to shoot that down, for instance that employees might try to do a joe job on their CEO, but a CEO is also in the position to enact meaningful oversight by creating corporate structures to ensure compliance.

A common argument used to support the human death penalty is that of deterence. I dont think it really deters individuals because they dont behave rationally enough, but it would absolutely deter big companies. If shareholders know their money is meaningfully on the line in the event of criminality, that will become part of their due diligence.

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.

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

It was all for free.

> 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.

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

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

I've never heard anyone use the phrase "under the table" unless there was money being exchanged for services without going through the proper channels. Your understanding was spot on. This was a bad use of a very old phrase.

> This was a bad use of a very old phrase.

This seems like a bit of a stretch. Just because you haven't heard a term used in different contexts doesn't mean it's invalid. On review of the same text I may have rephrased it, but while imperfect, it's still understandable in the context.

I believe "Under the table" in this case means the management was unaware and customer was not billed. It's the only scenario I can think of that would in this context be on the positive side of most ethical frameworks.

Happens a lot, in many types of companies and policies, that helping the customer has to be "under the table" / "off the books" :-/

You talk as if trying to avoid taxes is unethical.

But at least you got that iPhone!

bloke I knew worked in Tiny Computers in the UK in the late 90s. at xmas they were so busy the staff would just ignore any customer who did not want to buy an Extended Warrenty as they were not worth the time.

And people wonder why the High Street is failing?

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.

The only reason I've had to step foot in an Office Depot in the last 5 years is to drop off shipments. It's the closest FedEx and USPS drop-off location to me. Even then, I always try to have my items boxed and labelled before I go in so all I have to do is drop them off. I make a beeline for the back of the store, leave my items with the person, and politely say I don't need a drop-off receipt. Then I book it back to the front of the store and get the hell out.

That’s precisely the situation where I’d want a drop-off receipt just in case my package goes missing or magically opens itself.

They should have their corporate charters (or other enabling paperwork) dissolved.

Fraudulent tech support aside, people still need to buy office supplies. Unless their markups are horrible I don’t see why they shouldn’t exist for that.

Not easy to justify that square footage on selling pens alone.

There's more to office supply than just pens, though...

Fair dues to Office Max in New Zealand, they aren't like this. Instead, I get treated with cold indifference. To be honest, I find it preferable; if I'm going into a stationery/office supplies store, I know for what reason I'm going in — a personal tour guide certainly isn't necessary.

I go in, I get what I need, I pay, I go out. Might be a different company with the same name and logo.

I'm pretty sure it was Officemax in Christchurch I went to when I was there to buy a prepaid phone sim card.

There were so few sales people there that it took about 15 minutes standing at the counter to actually purchase it. The whole counter was completely unattended for that entire time.

Doesn't sound too unlike the (now-closed) one in Napier and the one in Wellington that seems like nobody's actually there until you look right down the back.

In Texas/Oklahoma, the Office Max / Office Depot stores I've been to have all been decent. I almost only go to them for printing services (and at every store, the printing people have been great), but I've bought a cheap mouse here and there when I couldn't wait for shipping. I've seen signs for those "services", but never any upsells. I guess it would be different if an average customer tried to buy a computer, idk.

When there's an opportunity for deception to increase margins, I find these types of stores decent so long as they detect that you are not ignorant.

I once had a clerk at Staples tell me that they couldn't in good conscience sell my father-in-law the really, really good deal on a laptop "because it had 6GB of RAM, which is really unstable, like you know how CPUs only come in powers of 2 in order to work right", which I suspect could be translated as "this awesome deal of a laptop is a scam advertising offer, and we don't have any in stock and can't write a rain check at this bogus price."

What he meant is probably based on the fact that if you are using double channel memory access mode then cpu can read from other module while first one is busy and since he said it was 6 GB so probably (4GB + 2GB) which means when you fill memory to 4 GB mark it will not have free module to alternate and performance will degrade. But this is all in theory and highly speculative in practice you would probably see 10-15% ram speed degradation not a 50% as you would expect. So unless there were some other issues like mismatched ram frequency the statement that is has to be in the powers of 2 is not really a hard rule, to perform optimally you want it to be but it is not strictly necessary.

I'm willing to bet any amount of money that that's not what he meant.

The clerks at those stores often have no idea what they're talking about and just repeat things they've heard.

In this case, it's actually very possible that the clerk really thought that incredibly stupid statement about a product that the store was selling.

On the other hand, I've found that sales attracts and retains incredibly unethical people, too, so that's still a possibility as well.

I don't know if it's true, but I remember reading on HN that Samples makes all it's money delivering office supplies to businesses and that their stores are essentially just warehouses.

Whatever did you have against Sears?

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.

That sounds like a really weird experience.

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.

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.

Doubly ridiculous considering that people who spend too long in the pens aisle are Staples's main customer base.

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.

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.

"Geek Squad" was an independent company in Minneapolis 20 years ago that was acquired by Best Buy. There's no reason to put "scare quotes" around it.

n.b. I worked for them as a part-timer (aka 'Rookie Agent') from 98-00 while I was in high school before the company was acquired by Best Buy. I stopped working there when the founder decided to unexpectedly let go of all of the part timers for whatever reason.

The reason I use double quotes is because there is nothing geeky about what they do. They deceive people in the name of computer health checks, mostly old people and less tech savvy folks. There are dozens of stories of these “Geeks” that steal personal information from customers’ computers.

I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make?

Want a dozen + 1?

As a friend, I setup a precision workstation for a small business owner. Part of this setup was a hardware raid 1 array. (He wanted a fast machine that was very reliable. His money, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯).

He took it to the Geek Squad to have a printer setup on it. These idiots destroyed the raid array while doing idk what complimentary scan or wtf ever. The friend had also stopped using the dropbox drive and used the regular user's folders to save stuff.

This did not end well. It was judged to be my fault for using poor quality hardware and software. He bought a gaming desktop from Best Buy. I learned a lesson.

> Office Depot, Staples, Office Max : These stores need to die.

In the UK, Office Outlet (formerly Staples) was placed in administration last week. [1]

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-47626280

But at least they price match so I don't have to wait two whole days.

... airlines, rental car companies, shoe stores, insurance brokers, video games, SASS vendors...

Is there a business that doesn’t try and suck out your wallet with ad-ons, premium packages and options of dubious value?

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

[2] https://www.pcmag.com/news/349821/office-depot-caught-sellin...

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.

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.

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.

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 )

The actual complaint: https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/cases/office_depo...

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

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.

The same can be said of many online service companies who use outside expertise to do the actual work and mark up their services to cover the cost and essentially profit for by talking to the customer. Welcome to the real world.

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?

Sears automotive service all over again.

What did they do?

Unnecessary repairs.

https://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/12/business/accusation-of-fr...

"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.

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

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.

exactly.

I wonder if you can FOIA to get the actual numbers, or the estimates of the numbers for how the FTC arrived at $15M

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.

This is similar to the VW emissions scandal in reverse.

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

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

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?

itunes?

Not funny.

Yes, it's just sad.

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.

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

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?

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.

They're not ripping me off if I want to give them money. macOS works and not only gets the job done, but gets out of the way.

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.

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

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.

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