Customer tried to impersonate an employee and justice was served

So I work for a credit servicing company – we service accounts from over 1,300 retailers on top of multiple general purpose credit credits and my job is to take escalated calls. You can already begin to imagine the things I’ve seen – today was the most satisfying though. I’ll refer to the company as CC.

A little bit of account detail – lady went multiple pay periods without payment and got reported as late. She has been calling at least once a week to get it adjusted because we made an error. What was our error? Well we postdated two payments for her and she forgot to reschedule and doesn’t look at her statements each month. Her words, not mine.

Today a customer care received a call from someone claiming to be Diane from the “CC Accounts Department.” Multiple red flags for the agent (praise her for noticing it right away):

1. This “Diane” did not have the customer on the line. We cannot call each other through our phone software – we have desk phones for this.

2. There is no “Accounts Department.”

3. Whenever someone access an account their employee ID automatically populates in the notes section of the software. No new employee ID was showing.

Diane immediately said, “Yes, we need to make an adjustment to the credit reporting on this customer’s account as we made an error. Are you able to help?”

No Diane, no customer service representative has access to adjust this because adjusting it without there being an error on our end is considered “selective reporting” which is illegal. The customer care agent immediately said they will get a supervisor to help and began to transfer to me.

Once I heard the situation I got so excited. More excited than when a fire started in the elevator shaft and we got to go home 6 hours early. My mind already flooded with questions to probe her with:

1. What’s your employee ID?

2. Who’s your unit manager?

3. What’s the name of the department you’re from because the “account’s department” doesn’t fucking exist.

4. Why are you making an inbound call from the only phone number associated with the customer’s account?

But I thought, ah hell this is special situation. I got my unit manager and they explicitly told me to have the agent transfer to Fraud, not me.

So I got back on the line and said,

Me: I just reached out to my unit manager, they advised that you should transfer to Fraud as it is clearly the customer.
Diane: Huh?
Me: …Hello?
Diane: What was that?
Me: This is Diane from Accounts correct?
Diane: Yes
Me: I’m going to have to get you over to our Fraud department and they will be able to help you.
Diane: Thank you!

The fucking agent transferred to me on accident and I just told Diane the master plan. This supposed Diane hung up as soon as the transfer to Fraud began.

But see, the story doesn’t end here.

Someone other than the account holder pretending to be someone from our company is trying to make changes to another person’s account on the account holder’s only listed phone. By policy, we have to completely lock the account down. I’ve never placed a block so fast and so happily in my life.

They no longer have the ability to use their card at all. The only way to remove this block is to verify your identity (name, date of birth, address, and social security verification with documents to validate.)

I reached out to the Fraud UM who sent her a very nice letter which said in short,

“Call us immediately we blocked your account.”

What a wonderful day.