Dell walloped with $6.5 million fine for fake monitor discounts
Dell's Australian arm has been hit with an AUD $10 million ($6.5 million) fine for fake monitor discount prices.
The Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (via Ars Technica) says that Dell is guilty of «making false and misleading representations on its website about discount prices for add-on computer monitors.»
Arguably, what isn't surprising is Dell's advertised discounts not being quite what they seem but the company actually being held to account. Anyway, the specific ruse here involves advertised prices placed next to a higher price with a strikethrough line. That implies the advertised price is lower than the monitor's usual cost.
But the strikethrough prices weren't actually representative of the typical cost. If fact, the whole thing was so out of whack the actual offer price was sometimes higher than what Dell Australia typically charged for a given monitor, making the strikethrough price even higher than that.
«In some cases, consumers paid more for the add-on monitor advertised as 'discounted' than they would have paid if they had bought it as a stand-alone product, which is shocking,» ACCC commissioner Liza Carver said. Overall, the ACCC reckons Dell customers spent an excess $2 million AUD (about $1.3 million) on Dell monitors from August 2019 to December 2021.
Dell has been ordered to provide full or partial refunds to customers. Dell also told Ars Technica today that it is paying interest on the overcharges to customers and «taking steps to improve our pricing processes to ensure this sort of error does not happen again.»
If that all sounds above board, well, one could argue that sharp pricing practices abound on Dell's websites, that this is merely the tip of the iceberg.
One of the more egregious
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