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this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024
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It was the rare occasion of someone being so stupid that they accidentally started their own cell phone scam.
This guy could not decide on what phone he wanted. He had two plans with all of his relatives on them. Whenever someone became eligible for a contract renewal, he would buy himself a phone and give his old one to one of those relatives. He also was very picky, and would try to return his phones for dumb reasons like "I haven't turned my phone off since I got it, and now it's running slow."
He would hop between different stores and customer service to get warranty replacements for his older phones, and exchanges for new ones, and because he was passing phones between accounts, a phone that he had for a year, would look like it was just bought a few days ago, so he would be offered a brand new one, or the option to try another model. When he came into my store complaining, something didn't seem right, so I spent an entire day researching where all his phones came from and where they went. I discovered that for years, he was costing us thousands of dollars burning through brand new phones and requesting credits for his inconvenience.
The last time we told him that we couldn't help him, he said he'd never come back, we thanked him.
I'm really glad someone out there is costing these companies money.
So many times it's AT&T and Verizon selling you an "insurance plan" for your phone that still requires you to pay $99-$300 if you actuality need your phone replaced. That's objectively worse than no "insurance".
Maybe I'd feel differently about it if I had that pro-capitalist "your loss is my gain" mindset... and also owned shares in AT&T. But being a human capable of empathy and humanity, AT&T and Verizon just disgust me.
You're not wrong. There were times I felt pretty dirty doing what they asked of me in order to close more sales. I worked with some decent people who cared more about the customer's needs, and some shitty ones that cared more about that commission check.
This guy was a real asshole on top of it all, and he was trying to pull it off on my watch, so, no regrets on shutting him down. I'm sure he's still pulling similar shit at other stores.
So many companies! Back when I worked Arclight, it was a small bit of subtle manipulation: "would you like to turn that to a large for only an additional 40¢?"
I hated it, because I knew the purpose was to pressure people into buying more than they wanted.
Thankfully, the place was run like the Trump Administration, so no one really knew how consistently the company's stupid mind games were being deployed against our guests.
But anyways! Yeah. Feeling dirty is pretty reasonable. The things we do for rent money...
What's with that, anyways? Why aren't real-life thieves more like charismatic, charitable Robin Hoods?
Because the charismatic ones you are less likely to notice. Also most people who work for Evil Corp know their company is evil, so if a polite charismatic person is taking advantage of the system you're less likely to go dig out what they're doing.
For example if in OPs story the guy had been polite and charming, he would have never gone into his account to check what was up, because it would be just a nice customer being nice. What's to tell you that there weren't other dozen like that that flew right under OPs nose, just because they never awoke suspicion.
Yup, being nice and polite to the people helping you is the single biggest way to get them to look the other way or have them bend the rules for you. The instant you start playing the asshole card, you usually get strict by-the-letter policy.
At a prior employer, we noticed that there were many customers getting essentially free service ($100-200 per month) by calling customer service hundreds of times per month and asking for credits for all sorts of things. They were generally very nice and just picked up $5-10 credits until their service was free. Beyond the free service, they were costing the company the expense of the service calls.
We started routing all of them to a small group of agents and flagged the accounts so the agents would deny them pretty much every time. It was kind of funny because we didn't tell them anything changed, but you could see that some of them noticed because they started asking which call center they were talking to. They would immediately hang up and call back over and over and just keep going back to the same place. Eventually most of them gave up.
Note: nobody here would/should feel sorry for this particular company, but I still thought it was funny to see these scammers get mad that we caught on to the scam.