Tale of Two Frauds

Today we received a call from our bank. 3 calls actually as they tried us at home, my cell and Chris’s before they reached us. Credit card fraud.

The bank was very proactive, asking us 2 questions, and then informing us that our card had fraudulent activity in India. They would cancel the card immediately and send a new one out for arrival in the next 2 days. Their attitude was that we were innocent of the charges until they found out otherwise, as the charges did not match our profile or our location. They are refunding all the charges.

Later that day Casey’s Skype account was hacked from Zimbabwe and all her credits used up. How did we find out?  Skype cut off her account with no warning –  in the middle of a conversation Casey was having with me –  forcing us to call Skype defensively and find out what was going on. After some digging Skype mentioned that we had suspicious activity on our account and they shut it down. After it the fraud was discovered Skype blamed us and we were informed that they will NOT refund the lost credits. Skype  said that we obviously….

• Had out of date security / antivirus. Wrong! We have the most powerful up to date Trend Software on all our machines. It’s updated daily or weekly, what ever they do automatically…..
• We left our computer untended – Casey works by herself  in our office. The computer is never in a public place and if anyone is in the office it’s me.
• We must have given her log in to someone else. Yes…that’s the case. Casey and I have a habit of writing our user names and passwords on bathroom walls in Zimbabwe.

Sheesh.  So Skype is saving $25 by not refunding us and at the same time making 2 customers feel  like the criminals. Great service skills and policies.

I was very happy when I got off the phone with the bank. Sure it’s a pain to cancel your cards, but RBC acted in our interests and came to our help proactively and quickly.

Casey and I are still steaming over Skype. They treated us as guilty until proven innocent, put their interests before ours, and blamed us for their breach in security. The $25 they save in not refunding us will go along way to help them when I don’t renew my credits with them this month.

Do you act as a customer advocate or a customer prosecutor?

Are your customer service policies sales prevention policies?

Dedicated to increasing your sales,

Colleen