If you lie about who you are, is it fraud?

This isn't, strictly speaking, a technology report, but people who use some applications have been receiving letters that look a lot like invoices from the new publisher of a series of overpriced newsletters that deliver only scant content to subscribers. I haven't subscribed to any of the newsletters since 1999 or earlier. Yet I received several "invoices" from the company with offers to "extend" my trial subscription or "renew" an existing subscription.

The first indication that something wasn't quite right was the use of false and misleading return addresses. I don't know if this is illegal; if not, it should be. From a direct marketing standpoint it is at the very least unethical and I will never deal with any company that tricks me into opening the envelope.

		This letter claims to come from the Indemnification Department in the "Office Center" in New York City. Click any of the images for a larger view.
		This is high-rent office space. Sixth Avenue between 51st and 52nd avenues.
		And the information is dated, too! Wow!
		But it was mailed from Charlotte, North Carolina. New York City has lots of lettershop operations, so why would a New York firm have a North Carolina company handle its mail?
		The second one I'll show you claims to come from New Mexico.
		I don't know anyone in New Mexico.
		Wow! It's document "S2B2". I'd better open this!
		And it's good that the documents inside are intended only for me. This must be important.
		The return address says New Mexico, but the letter was mailed (according to the Zip code) in Nashville. This is not illegal or unethical.
As it turns out, the company in question is not from either New York or New Mexico. Instead, New Hill Services runs its operation from a post office box in Baltimore. Let's take a look at the faux invoices.
		It looks a lot like an invoice, doesn't it?
		It's a subscription notice and it even has my account number and my order number. I have no subscription. I have ordered nothing.
		What do you think the accounts payable folks would have done if this had gone to them?
		It does mention that this is not an invoice, but only in small type in an area the reader might not notice.
		Here's the one from New Mexico. It's billed as a "continuation notice" for a trial subscription.
		Needless to say, I do not have a trial subscription that needs to be continued.
		As before, the legal notification that this is really not an invoice is in much smaller type.

So in the strictest interpretation of the law, this is probably not fraud even though New Hill Services lied about their identity on the envelope and even though their "offers" were clearly designed to look not like offers but like invoices.

Ethics? We don't need no stinking ethics!

Better Business Bureau report (http://www.baltimore.bbb.org/commonreport.html?bid=17012422)

Wide Open West fails another tech support test

Monday evening (25 Sep 2006) between 8 and 8:30 Internet access became slow. Websites started timing out with a "site cannot be found" message. Ping using IP addresses was instantaneous. Ping using named domains took 15 to 20 seconds to start. To me, this appeared clearly to be a nameserver problem. I called Wide Open West's technical support for what I expected to be a brief call reporting a problem. Wrong.

I described the problem and asked if there was a problem with the nameserver. "We're not showing any outages in your area," the technician said. Of course not, the problem wasn't "in my area"; it appeared to be a problem with Wide Open West's nameserver. But I knew what questions I would be asked and what actions I would be asked to perform. I had already done all those things.

1. First I was told it's a problem with your computer. (Before I even called, I'd unplugged the router, plugged the computer directly in to the modem, and repeated my test with identical results. I knew the problem was not with the computer or the modem at this point.)
2. Then I was told that all 3 of my computers had failed! I had connected each computer (one Windows machine and two Macs) directly to the cable modem and had confirmed that I had been issued a valid IP address. Each had the same symptoms. "Don't you find it a bit odd to say that 3 computers have failed simultaneously," I asked. "Strange things happen with these electronic devices," the WOW technician replied. Reminder: At this point, my router out of the picture. Disconnected.
3. Then, (despite #2), I was told that the problem "must be a configuration problem" with the computers or the router. (Recall that the router is out of the picture at this point.)
4. I continued to suggest that it looked to me like a nameserver problem, but the technician told me it cannot possibly be a nameserver problem because I was able to obtain a valid IP address and I could ping an IP address. Clearly the technician doesn't understand the difference between the DHCP server, which provides an IP address, and DNS server, which translates domain names to IP addresses -- the nameserver.
5. The technician continued to tell me that the problem was not with the cable modem, which I already knew because the problem was clearly with WOW's infrastructure. I continued to state that the problem appeared to be a nameserver issue, but the technician said that WOW has no nameservers (!) or that maybe WOW did have some nameservers, but they were used only for e-mail.
6. When I asked to speak with a level 2 technician, the technician said, "I am a level 2 technician." (A level 2 technician that doesn't know what a nameserver is? I think not.)
7. When I asked to speak with the technician's supervisor, I was told, "Let me put you on hold for a minute." After 15 minutes on "infinite hold", I hung up.

I had been on the phone or on hold for about an hour. The problem resolved itself approximately an hour after I hung up. That's probably about the time a WOW network engineer found the problem with the nameserver and fixed it.

The next day , to confirm my diagnosis of the situation, I described the preceding 7 steps to a network engineer who is responsible for a business that collects data from 15,000 companies each night. His response: "You are correct. Nameserver would be the number 1 answer (sounds like it was not slaving properly.) I hate to say, but sometimes it's better to play stupid and just hang up on them when you know you have exceeded their check list, and call back to get someone else."

The WOW technician I spoke with Tuesday evening was unfailingly polite, but he was no level 2 technician. Every single time that I have had to deal with WOW technical support I have found the technicians to be polite, but not very bright. In all, I wasted an hour with the technician and the result was nothing but frustration for both of us.

In writing to Colleen Abdoulah (president and CEO), Scott Neesley (VP and Ohio general manager), Michael Brody (chief technical officer), and Michael Furst (Senior VP, customer care), I pointed out that when a customer asks the technician to escalate the issue, that is what should happen.

WOW responds

A day or two later, I heard from the "ombudsman" at WOW's corporate office. The ombudsman said that he could see the call record and that the technician who had taken the call had not, despite what he told me at the time, a "level 2" technician. I also learned that it's WOW's policy not to leave a caller on hold for more than 5 minutes without providing status information and that "infinite hold" is not a corporate policy.

I was told that WOW would have a talk with the technician. I'm hoping the talk won't be to congratulate him for doing an outstanding job.

No highly trained dogs here!

On September 24, I mentioned highly trained dogs, these are typically customer service folks at large companies. They may be underpaid. They may be overworked. They may be lazy. They may be not particularly bright. They might be all of those and more. When customers deal with these highly trained dogs, the dogs respond, but usually get it all wrong. I've described some places where trained dogs are employed. Here's an example of a place that does NOT employ highly trained dogs.

This isn't the first time I've mentioned TCR Computers on the east side. They've been in business for 20 years or more, in part because they don't employ highly trained dogs. When you order a computer, they'll make suggestions that are right for you even if the result is a computer that costs less than what you had in mind. And when something goes wrong, they take care of the problem quickly and professionally.

Twice I've had serious computer problems on a long holiday weekend. In one case, I was formatting the C drive and had forgotten that serial ATA drives need a special device driver. In the other case, a memory chip began failing and causing frequent crashes. Both times I received answers to my support e-mail messages -- not on the following Tuesday when I expected them -- but on Saturday. Right in the middle of a holiday weekend.

Well, it happened again. I was trying to burn a DVD that the burner application told me there was no DVD present in the drive. I knew that was wrong. The drive was present on the hardware list and I had put a blank DVD in it. The drive had power (the door opened and closed). I downloaded a diagnostic from the manufacturer's website. It saw the drive and allowed me to update the firmware.

But the drive would not read a CD or a DVD and it would not burn a disc. I had thought that the data cable might have come loose, but being able to upgrade the firmware told me that wasn't the case, either. So the drive had power. The disc would spin. The logic circuitry was working. That left the laser. I sent a note to TCR support.

"Sounds like the drive has failed. We'll send you a new one," was the reply. They know me well enough to understand that I prefer the 5-minute job of opening the case and swapping out a component to driving nearly 30 minutes one way to have them do the 5-minute job. There was no mention of needing a credit card number to ensure that I would return the failed drive so that they could get credit for it.

The drive arrived (actually, they had to send a second drive because the first disappeared in transit), I installed it, and returned the defective unit. This is the way customer support is supposed to work. Oh ... and I should probably also mention that TCR's computers come with a 3 year warranty. Yes, 3 years, not 3 months, is correct. It is also unusual.

Nerdly News

Does "recall" occur naturally in sentences that begin with "battery"?

Fujitsu has announced a battery recall. Fujitsu makes notebook computers that are powered by Sony batteries and the company is recalling 287,000 of them because of a potential fire risk. That brings to 7 million batteries recalled by Toshiba, Lenovo, Dell, Sony, and Apple.

The recalls began in August and coverage was fueled by pictures of a Dell computer catching fire and burning. Analysts say there could still be 3 million Sony batteries that haven't been recalled. Sony could bleed half a billion dollars in the process. Sony Energy Device Corporation also makes batteries for laptop makers including Hewlett Packard (which has been dealing with other problems lately), Sharp, and Hitachi. Sony also makes batteries for other portable electronic devices – DVD players and game consoles – but so far there have been no recalls for those products.

Criminal charges filed in HP case

Former Hewlett-Packard head Patricia Dunn appeared in court this week after California's attorney general charged her in connection with a spying operation at the company. Charges have been filed (or are expected to be) against others, including the company's former legal counsel.

Dunn surrendered and was booked on four felony charges. Her arraignment is scheduled for mid November. California attorney general Bill Lockyer charged Dunn and four others with felonies stemming from the use of pretexting, or using deception to obtain phone records of board members and journalists as part of an investigation into boardroom leaks to the media.

Dunn will appear on CBS's 60 Minutes Sunday evening. CBS has provided information about Dunn's comments: “Every company conducts investigations,” Dunn is quoted as saying. Investigations are “intrusive by their nature” and “if you think that Hewlett-Packard is the only company that has an investigations force — which by the way, is peopled mostly with former law enforcement officers that do all kinds of private detective work, monitoring, posing as other people in order to solve problems to protect shareholder value — you’re being naïve.”

In other words, Everybody else does it. Why can't I do it, mommy? Hewlett-Packard's founders are probably spinning at about 78rpm these days. Dunn resigned as chairperson, but categorically denied personal responsibility for the illegal activities.

The California attorney general says, though, that Dunn knew about pretexting (aka lying) to obtain private telephone records. HP lawyer Kevin Hunsaker was booked on four felony charges this week and the attorney general filed charges against private investigator Ronald DeLia, information broker Matthew DePante, and operative Bryan Wagner, the man accused of obtaining private phone records by pretexting (aka lying). We could do with a little more truth about lying these days.

Going back to the beginning of this week's report, “If you lie about who you are, is it fraud?”

Annoying legal disclaimer

My attorney says I really need to say this: The TechByter website is for informational purposes only. I assume no responsibility for its accuracy, although I do my best. The information is subject to change without notice. Any actions you take based on information from the radio program, the podcast, or from this website are entirely at your own risk. Products and services are mentioned for informational purposes only and their various trademarks and service marks are the property of their respective owners. TechByter cannot provide technical support for products or services mentioned.