A series of fake customer support sites claiming to troubleshoot problems with Canon printers are scamming customers. These sites claim to offer legitimate printer drivers and then charge users money to solve made up problems on their computers.
Gizmodo discovered scam websites by filing a FOIA request with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for consumer complaints about Canon. The report also adds that FTC complaints about Robinhood, Binance, Airbnb, Venmo and Tinder reveal a similar scamming pattern.
These scam websites generally offer fake drivers that fail to download. After that, a chatbox opens, connecting them to a ‘customer support’ representative who offers to fix a made-up problem for money. Sometimes scammers might even ask customers to download remote access software and gain access to their computers.
The sites also have customer support numbers that connect users to these scammers, who then sell support packages but just steal the money.
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Most notably, these sites are quite sophisticated and often rank higher in Google search results than the actual Canon website, which makes users more susceptible to fall for the scam in the first place. Some of the fake websites are as follows:
- canonijcomsetup.com
- canon-com-ijsetup.com
- canon.com-ijsetup.com
- ij-start-canon.us
- ijcanonsetup.com
- printersetup.org/canon-printer-setup
- canonijstart.co
- ijstartcanon.com
Some of these websites have been taken down by the time of writing.
Another reason why customers fall for such scams because Canon’s website isn’t exactly great and often has unexplained errors. Gizmodo reached out to Canon multiple times for a comment, but the company didn’t respond. Gizmodo obtained complaints from 2021 but couldn’t identify the claims as the FTC redacted all identifying information.
The best way to ensure you’re not getting scammed is to visit the actual Canon website and not download any third-party drivers from external sources. Legitimate customer support representatives will also not ask for an upright price without adequately diagnosing a problem, so a little bit of caution goes a long way.
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