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The original was posted on /r/microsoft by /u/BoRBrakkar on 2025-10-10 22:39:31+00:00.
I saw some scam/malware controversy on Reddit about PDFgear and PDF X (by NG PDF Lab). I bought PDF X a while ago and it scammed me. I left a review at the time in the Microsoft Store and I remember it was full of reviews saying similar things about it being either malware or a scam.
What’s the deal with Microsoft and its app store? Is no one at Microsoft curating their own app store and letting it be completely overrun by scams and malware??
This is the app to avoid confusion: https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9p3cp9g025rm?hl=en-US&gl=US
People worried about PDFgear have been asking what was the PDF X scam, since they’re essentially the same app, and logically the same developer.
The scam I encountered was
- The app was the top ranked PDF app in the Microsoft Store, labelled as free and had 50k five star rating with lots of generic but questionable 5 star reviews. I downloaded it thinking Microsoft would not let an app so high in rankings like this be illegitimate
- I worked on a PDF and made a lot of changes over an hour or two
- When I tried to save these changes, it said I needed to pay $70
- Frustrated and needing my work, I paid, and it still didn’t let me save
- It kept saying I needed to pay again
- I wrote into PDF X support and they didn’t reply
- Microsoft technicians said they were looking into it but it never got resolved
Since the controversy around PDFgear and its links to PDF X, I wanted to share how PDF X is a scam.
There’s very little doubt what they’re doing here. They’ve manipulated the Microsoft Store with ratings/reviews/installs to get to the top, deceive people into downloading the app, suppress the 1 star reviews/ratings with 10x fake 5 star reviews and ratings, and keep the flywheel going.
Not only does Microsoft let this happen, but they seem to be encouraging this to flourish. Microsoft is promoting them on their Store home page, and letting PDF X promote itself with ads (where Microsoft obviously cash in with ad revenue).
You need to ask yourself - How does an app that has 85k reviews in the Microsoft Store have no information about its company, and almost literally no presence outside of the Microsoft Store? If you type in “PDF X” “NG PDF Lab” into Google it has no more than 5 pages of results, basically meaning it doesn’t exist. Clearly they’ve gamed the Microsoft Store because they’ve found it profitable.
Someone helped me scrape their Microsoft Store reviews. It’s FULL of reports of scamming and malware. I’ll link a list to see yourself but they’re basically either
- This app brands itself as free, but is full of ads and can’t use anything unless you pay
- This app tricked me into paying for it but after I paid, it’s still not letting me do anything
- My anti-virus scanner says this is malware, so don’t download this virus
If you look at their 5 star reviews (second tab of the Google Sheets list), they are almost all only a few words like ‘great app’ and ‘easy to use’. But really, hardly any actually refer to what the app does. It’s obvious they just got some cheap labor to just pump out quick bs reviews without even knowing the app.
Check out the list yourselves.
Microsoft should be ashamed of themselves for letting apps and developers like this in their Store.
I hope that this will help people avoid PDF X by “NG PDF Lab” and alert Microsoft to delete and ban them.