Omnitech
Attempted to sell me unnecessary services at inflated price Los Angeles, California

I Googled 'microsoft help' and found Omnitech. Under the belief Omnitech was an authorized Microsoft help agent, I initiated a chat with them in an attempt to determine whether I could uninstall Microsoft Word 2010 Starter without losing documents I had created with the program. (I had since purchased Microsoft Word 2010 - the full-price program - and I knew I could open Starter documents in it. But I didn't know if I would lose those documents after uninstalling Starter.)

Omnitech asked me if they could establish a remote connection, and I consented. After 10 minutes, the Omnitech representative told me "I have found there are a lot of system registry errors and virus/malware threats which might crash the computer." I mentioned I was surprised because I had the current edition of Norton Antivirus installed in my computer. Omnitech replied that Norton "cannot detect all the infections such as registry corruptions, operating system errors, Polymorphic infections, etc. Such infections have to be scanned and removed manually by performing optimizations in your computer." Omnitech then told me they would optimize my registry for the "nominal charge" of $79.99, and attempted to sell me an "Assurance Plan, " a subscription plan that would continue to optimize my registry for an additional charge.

I smelled a scam, and I told Omnitech I would not pay a Microsoft help agent to fix problems for which Microsoft is responsible, i.E., weak security. Omnitech said they would have to terminate the chat. I asked Omnitech to email me a transcript of the chat, but they did not, which, in itself, is a questionable practice. I copied and pasted the transcript myself, and I have used direct quotations from the transcript - minus a few punctuation errors - in this report.

I cleaned my registry with CCleaner, which is free, and it did not, as I suspected, indicate much contamination. I also uninstalled Word 2010 Starter without losing files or damaging my registry, as Omnitech purported. Despite Omnitech's A rating from the BBB, they are a scam, pure and simple. The BBB should be ashamed of themselves, and I will never trust them again.

Company: Omnitech
Country: USA
Site: omnitechsupport.com

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