Obligatory mobile warning also this is a HELLA long one so strap in folks!
For context: I work overnight with a company who’s a vendor for a semi new cell company and take escalated calls/help with difficult accounts. As in we haven’t had our second birthday as a company yet so the systems and policies etc are NOWHERE near as good as the big four carriers in the US. This causes a lot of issues, but none quite as big as when we changed billing systems. It caused a lot of chaos because the company just TRANSFERRED everything over the course of 3 days and didn’t bother doing a test run.
So this story takes place both before and then after this transition.
I first spoke to Sally (obvs fake name) sometime in 2018 about a credit. I was new to taking escalated calls and she wasn’t being rude but she had been having “issues with returns” and needed compensation for all the time she spent on the phone because of our incompetence. OK fine so I review the account and this lady somehow has 8 open lines, 4/5 of which are currently in various stages of returns. Some were exchanges. The damn thing is a mess. So I read through the notes hoping desperately there’s some clarity.
None. None whatsoever.
As far as I can tell this lady has had ALL the devices we sent out for exchanges stolen and there aren’t any open disputes with the mail carrier and now she’s being charged in full for SEVERAL 1000+ phones. Our upper tiers are all over this and policy is we can’t give credit till an issue is resolved. OK fine I take the damn call and explain for the better part of 40 minutes that no Sally I can’t give you a credit. You’ve already been credited multiple times even though it’s out of policy. No I can’t send you out a phone RIGHT THIS INSTANT because there is still an investigation pending. She hangs up all is good.
She becomes a chronic caller calling 4-8 times per night for the next month and a half and bounces between me and my coworker on sup calls. Eventually she somehow gets a few more phones and a few more exchanges. Don’t ask me how, our system was only supposed to allow 5 active lines at any given time and this woman had like 10 already and somehow ALL THE PACKAGES kept being “stolen”.
Around week 2 of this me and my coworker finally piece together what’s happening. There’d been some weirdness with the IMEIs on the account. Phones that were “stolen” were showing as active on the account and then a few days later they’d all be swapped around. Given that we saw this account at least 20 times a week a piece, we were fairly sure that this lady was committing IMEI fraud.
Basically she was ordering exchanges and new phones, saying they were “stolen” and then moving around sims so that she could get different phones activated and then doing lord knows what with the phones (probably selling them cos they were ALL iPhone X’s with 256 GB memory). Then when the return period was up and we directly debited her for the phones we never received back she’d call and do her spiel during the day and try to get the device payments removed off and then call at night for hella credit. Out of like the 7 or so phones she had reported stolen through exchanges and the like she had had 4/5 removed off the account. Which is like more money than I can think of being removed off an account but oh well lol.
Finally we get a new call from her. Her services have been deactivated. We need to turn them on right now because she has a kid blah blah blah same spiel I get everytime someone wants us to turn back on a phone.
I read the notes. Fraud has closed down her account. Turns out the IMEIs of some of the “stolen” phones were found on other accounts that had also reported some issue with the phones. Hallelujah there was a light at the end of the tunnel!
Except now instead of calling 4-8 times per night about the stolen phones she was calling about turning on her phone. Which we couldn’t do cos this account wasn’t normal deactivated it was BAN HAMMER levels of deactivated and we didn’t have access to a backend to turn the lines on individually. Which is important to the next part of this story.
Eventually she stops calling. A year passes. Billing migration from hell happens. Then I get a chat request for a sup. Some lady wants credits for a stolen phone she’s being charged for and for the “inconvenience”…..
I ABOUT LOST MY DAMN MIND WHEN I SAW THE NAME.
Basically what happened is that in the billing migration the fraud tag just fell off her account. And she somehow found out and started her shenanigans again. Cue another week of the same old same old until finally I reach out to a TL tired of this song and dance.
You might be thinking, spicychicknnugget why don’t you just report her to your fraud team? She has a history of this. Surely it’ll get taken care of from there.
Well my dear reader: we didn’t have the option to forward it to that team unless it was the customer reporting fraud.
Yep, you read that correctly. Even if we were sure there was fraud we couldn’t / can’t report it unless the customer asks us to. Which is what that TL reiterated to me. We can however call the customer out on her current bullshit and tell her we see that the IMEI of a device she claimed was stolen is in fact active and showed usage on the account.
Because the current state of affairs was that Sally had purchased a couple phones. Best Apple models out at the time, highest storage capacity. The works. And then returned them to the store for an exchange. Run of the mill stuff. Except of course we didn’t receive them. Again. Surprise surprise /s.
But now with our new system we get notifications if sims are swapped, which wasn’t appearing on the account so she definitely had this fucking phone. One of my agents calls her out on this, we do some digging and see a higher tier agent did some bs workaround to get her service in the first place which is why we see a line deactive for the device she claimed to return and one active.
Basically she had activated the phone but because she still owed us hella cash for the old account the system deactivated her ass. Because there were no notes about her old fraudulent activities (all in the previous system and not migrated over and no fraud tag) higher tier does workaround. So we point out, hey this is what happens and guys
SHE CLAIMS SHE NEVER HAD SERVICES WITH US BEFORE AND CAN’T POSSIBLY OWE US THIS AMOUNT AND OBVIOUSLY ITS FRAUD
Mind you, I’ve spoken with this women upwards of 30 times. I know her voice. It’s the same lady. It’s not fraud done on her account done by anyone else but her. But she said the magic words and so GLEEFULLY reported the amount but also included ALL the previous history and heavily marked the account for no credits.
Guess who had their service shut off 2 weeks later?
And that my friends is the saga of scammy Sally who wanted to steal phones and get credited for the inconvenience of it too.
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