Congratulations, Dell customer! You might have won! Won what, you ask? The opportunity to hand more money over to Dell for an extended warranty that you don’t necessarily need! During three calls to Dell technical support, Laptop Magazine found that technical support representatives offered a hardware warranty for a software problem, a software warranty for a hardware issue, and told a caller that he had won a mysterious daily drawing for the opportunity to buy a four-year extended warranty from Dell for the low, low price of $317. That sounds like the most boring sweepstakes ever.

Our friends over at Laptop Mag normally like Dell’s support, which is good, because we only hear from people who are unhappy with it. It’s good to hear that someone is satisfied. Every year, they call different vendors about the the same computer issues, and rate the support received as part of the publication’s Tech Support Showdown. A worthy endeavor, from our point of view, but this year the inappropriate-warranty-hawking from Dell warranted its own article.

Naturally, when contacted by a non-undercover reporter, Dell insisted that all of these tactics were either “errors” on the part of the support reps, or evaded Laptop Magazine’s actual questions about what Dell reps are supposed to be doing.

Dell Support Caught Using Shady Sweepstakes to Hawk Warranties

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