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"In Steps the Little Guy". Me vs Sprint
UncleChet
N00bLancaster, PARegistered User regular
N00bLancaster, PARegistered User regular
Good day all.
Saturday morning, some Ne'er do well attempted to hijack my Sprint account, by calling the company and posing as a relative that I don't have. They did not gain any information, however, without verifying anything, the sprint rep happily sent out my un-encrypted pin # and my un-encrypted "secret word". I immediately contacted the company to address this attempted hijack,to be informed that there was nothing the billing/account CSR could/would do to address the issue, that I would have to talk to the Fraud dept. but that they're closed on Saturdays. I had a callback from Fraud scheduled for today, from 8am to 1pm EST, but no call came. so, I called them again. I then spent about 3.5 hours of my workday (my boss is awesome) on the phone with 5 t1/t2 CSRs, 2 customer service supervisors, 3 fraud supers, and 1 fraud t2 super. The conclusion that the final supervisor came to was to simply Not use sprint.com and to block my accounts access to the website. (I use it to pay my bill). Now, I carry 6 devices on this company, i pay 60$ in LTE premiums, but have no LTE service (was the same w/WiMax). The final super that i talked to was Actually a victim of ID theft, and agreed (after several times of discussing it) that the Only reason there was no successful fraud was due to my own diligence and my own concern for security. She did say, that due to the fact that i carry such a large account, that there is no way her team would be able to work with the account svcs to allow me to term my contracts with no ETFs. They failed/refused to address Any of the issues that I felt were security related, though the young lady Did agree that it Was an issue, and that I was the one who prevented it, it's simply not in her ability to modify it in any way.
So, TLDR: Sprint gives out my info, I can't quit. What do I do?
Saturday morning, some Ne'er do well attempted to hijack my Sprint account, by calling the company and posing as a relative that I don't have. They did not gain any information, however, without verifying anything, the sprint rep happily sent out my un-encrypted pin # and my un-encrypted "secret word". I immediately contacted the company to address this attempted hijack,to be informed that there was nothing the billing/account CSR could/would do to address the issue, that I would have to talk to the Fraud dept. but that they're closed on Saturdays. I had a callback from Fraud scheduled for today, from 8am to 1pm EST, but no call came. so, I called them again. I then spent about 3.5 hours of my workday (my boss is awesome) on the phone with 5 t1/t2 CSRs, 2 customer service supervisors, 3 fraud supers, and 1 fraud t2 super. The conclusion that the final supervisor came to was to simply Not use sprint.com and to block my accounts access to the website. (I use it to pay my bill). Now, I carry 6 devices on this company, i pay 60$ in LTE premiums, but have no LTE service (was the same w/WiMax). The final super that i talked to was Actually a victim of ID theft, and agreed (after several times of discussing it) that the Only reason there was no successful fraud was due to my own diligence and my own concern for security. She did say, that due to the fact that i carry such a large account, that there is no way her team would be able to work with the account svcs to allow me to term my contracts with no ETFs. They failed/refused to address Any of the issues that I felt were security related, though the young lady Did agree that it Was an issue, and that I was the one who prevented it, it's simply not in her ability to modify it in any way.
So, TLDR: Sprint gives out my info, I can't quit. What do I do?
I'm sometimes grumpy and random, feel free to overlook the strange man in the corner.
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otherwise you might be better served calling back over and over again with the same complaint for each line and cancelling each line individually since it seems like they wouldn't allow you to do all the lines due to the size of your total account
I mean, I totally understand where you're coming from, but they're going to do absolutely nothing for you when it comes to what you're asking. You maybe, maybe, could get your bill lowered a little bit, but implementing new security measures? It's not going to happen.
So you can either move on, spend hours on the phone fighting for the smallest thing, or quit and pick a new carrier- who chances are will have the EXACT same policies and procedures as ATT.
I don't work for Sprint. But I work for a retailer of another major carrier (AT&T) and I can give you a kind of vague rundown of what happened
The rep that gave out your access info... didn't actually violate any FCC or whatever policies. He/she may have violated internal Sprint policies, but AT&T certainly has some options that allow for retrieval of account access information over the phone if you have the last 4 digits of the account holders SSN. This is why AT&T strongly recommends a billing password (different from an online access password) as without it, the reps won't give out any info.
Sprint probably has the same procedures. Assist customer who have locked themselves out of their accounts, as long as they haven't established a billing password. Furthermore, nothing in our Wireless Service Agreement (contract) indicates that you can terminate said contract because of such circumstances. They're sort of written expressly to forbid any kind of get-out-of-contract-free clause except in some FCC-mandated areas (such as mandatory rate hikes, which exclude additional taxes, service fees, regulatory recovery fees, and pretty anything the carrier wants).
With that said, you're screwed and you have little recourse. You probably agreed to an Arbitration Agreement which means that lawyering up is useless. AT&T has one and a carrier as big as Sprint would be foolish not to.
Your best case scenario here is that the rep who gave out your info gets fired. That's it. You won't see a dime of compensation, or get an out on your contract, or anything. It'll be dealt with internally, and that ends the matter. Because once a customer service rep has done something to expose the company to liability, they terminate them and claim that the rep acted against company policy (which is probably untrue in the strictest sense, but since it ended up in account fraud it becomes true. It's a Catch-22; it's only against policy if it ends up being used against the company, in which case they have nothing to do with it)
Get a billing password and hope that Sprint reps are given some extra training on account security. We just got a couple of pretty stark ones, which came after years of very, very little oversight over how we access accounts and give out info. It's way too late, but it'll scare employees straight for long enough that it will certainly do the job going forward.
nothing. You seem to have taken your issue as high into the CSR chain of command as you can, and not achieved a satisfactory resolution. The cat's out of the bag either way w/r/t your account security, so you can either quit their service or get over it.
If you really want to stick it to them, you can tell them you want them to terminate your contract immediately with no additional fees, and if they won't, take them to small claims for the difference. You are likely to win a default judgment (if they don't relent when the service arrives) because their fees aren't worth enough to them to bother sending counsel out to represent them. I did basically this with verizon over a billing issue a while back, worked out okay.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
The first thing you should know is that most companies outsource their call-in customer service to independent call centers, and these call centers each hav their own set of internal policies (separate from, but in theory signed-off on by, the client company) for dealing with customer accounts. This means that it is easy enough for a fraudster to call in repeatedly and, regardless of how well protected with passwords or anything else your account is, steal your identity (because if one rep won't give them your password, one in ten random reps from different companies probably will) - but it also means you can have better luck by calling in on different days to see if you can find a place with more consumer-friendly policies (don't repeatedly call in on the same day; most call center phone traffic is managed so that they receive all calls from a certain region for a working day, and then they get a new region the next day).
The second thing you should know is that a 'fraud department' in a call center is just more phone monkeys that have been at the job for long enough to get promoted into that department. They do not have special training, are not involved with law enforcement, do not usually have access to any special tools, etc. Most the most part - as far as the company is concerned - their job is just to placate you and / or intimidate you (with things like termination fees) so that you don't become more 'churn' (customers who leave and go to a different carrier). A lot of reps might really care about mitigating fraud or helping you out, but they don't have the means to do so.
Try calling-in over the next few days to see if you can get a better equipped call center on the phone. If you can't, you'll probably have to leave the carrier, unfortunately (shop around and see if anyone currently has a deal where they pay your ETF in exchange for your business. If not, you'll have to fight for it - but it's usually a pretty easy fight).
Not great odds on this but it has the added benefit of establishing that Sprint knew about this problem and ignored it for you. If you stay and something happens it is very bad for them.
I seem to recall a "consumerist sprint 800 number" that sprint put up to avoid executive email carpet bombs from consumerist readers, but YMMV in how well it works out for you. EDIT: It was posted up on consumerist.