Catching Fraud In The Act – What To Do When You Get Slammed

I am not the morality police and for sure the last person to stand on any soapbox and preach to people. And I certainly could care less how people choose to earn their livings. I say to each to their own.

What I do care is when I find out someone has cunningly used me as a tool to perpetrate their fraud or has outright used my identity for personal gain.

Yesterday morning I received a telephone call from a person who represented himself as a concierge from a company that my wife and I had hired to move our possessions across town for the end of this month.

After explaining to me who he was, he went on to tell me that a part of my moving package included coupons and special deals for many of the utility companies I might need in my up & coming move. He wanted my permission if he could send me an e-mail with these “special rates”.

I jokingly said as long as he does not give my information to anyone else he had my permission to email me the special rates. I then provided him with my email address and the conversation ended.

A few hours later I received an email. Not from my friendly concierge but from a Broadband reseller who relayed a message to me from our local Cable company.

“Congratulations! Your order has been placed directly with *** successfully!”

The e-mail went on to display all my personal information and notifying me that I had ordered their Premium Cable and High Speed Online including HDTV packages.

Being that my wife and I are up-to our eyes with moving boxes and the two of us have been on the phone everyday talking to different utility companies, I was not sure if she had changed over our Cable.

I quickly pinged her with an Instant Message asking her if she had ordered Cable for us and she said No!

I then called the Cable Company and attempted to explain to them what had just happened. But the customer support representative went on to explain to me that I must have been the one who ordered the service. Seriously, for several minutes he tried to convince me that I had been the one or my wife had been the one who ordered their service.

I tried to tell them someone had committed fraud but the guy did not want to hear what I had to say. So I asked to speak with his supervisor and when he got on the line I attempted to explain what had happened. The supervisor did not care at all either.

I was practically pulling my hair out while adamantly explaining I was not the one who signed up for their service. I requested that they cancel that order and that they investigate their resellers as one of them slammed me into a service I had never requested.

The supervisor not only told me to take up my problem with the reseller “since I obviously was doing business with them”, but he made it very difficult for me to cancel the order I had never placed with them. After a few more minutes of arguing with the supervisor I was then able to cancel the order.

I was just about to blow up at the guy when I said “I am helping you guys out because obviously you have resellers trying to fraudulently collect commissions, but it’s obvious you don’t care, so be it!”

At this point I called my moving company.

When calling them I found out that their company uses a third party to handle their “concierge offerings”. After getting the name of the concierge company I explained to the moving company what had taken place and that I never given authorization to the moving company to give my personal information out, let alone request to be signed up to any utility services. The fact of the matter was, I never signed one document with the moving company, not even for the move so for them to give my information (or sell my personal information) is a complete personal violation.

Now I called the Concierge.

This was a treat. When I called I did not start off shooting from the hip. I had mentioned to the first person who answered my call that they put me on the phone with the man who called me earlier that day. I did not have the name of the guy but I mentioned I had more questions from previously and wanted to finish our conversation.

Apparently I was told this was not such an easy task and the guy who I was now on the phone with made it clear I must speak with him. I told him I did not want to speak with him and this conversation went around in circles for a few minutes before he told me he has to look me up on a computer that “has more power” because my request was so unique.

I am not kidding – that is exactly what he said. For him to track down who called me originally he needed a supercomputer.

I finally got a supervisor on the phone who then handed me off to the guy who originally called me. I asked the guy to explain to me what rights he had to sign me up to a service I never authorized.

Turns out, the guy was new to the job and he explained it was innocent mistake. We spoke for 10 minutes and while doing so I could hear many people in the background reading the same pitch I had heard earlier that day.

I then asked to speak with his supervisor. After a few minutes of speaking the supervisor he tells me he had a listen to the original phone conversation on recording and that he admits I was mislead by their company and they were at fault.

Here is a breakdown of what happened:

1. A moving company who I have signed nothing with gave my information to another company.

2. This second company calls me on the phone and records my conversation without telling me I was being recorded or asking for my permission.

3. This second company represents that they are with my moving company and they want to send me an email with discounts as a value added service.

4. This second company then takes my personal information they got from the moving company, signs me up to a local Cable company without my permission to fraudulently collect commissions. (I am only guessing this part but I figure since cable companies have a monopoly on our local area, chances are pretty high we would use this company for our Cable, unless we had Dish. When signing up with said Cable Company this second company would get paid out for referring the business.)

5. The supervisor of this second company admits to me that they are wrong for what they did and offers to send me a “Visa Gift Card”.

At this point I had enough and got off the phone.

Now I wonder what I should do about this. What I think happened here is what is called Slamming and long distance telephone companies were prone to doing things like this back in the day. But from what I understand it has became illegal.

What would you do?

This entry was posted on Friday, June 15th, 2007 at 11:23 am and is filed under I Just Don't Know. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.