craigsrant.com

The war has begun.

OK, to be fair, I can be a little anal.  A little like a dog with a bone when I get sufficiently riled up.  So I want to be balanced jsut for a second.  I want to acknowledge that up until this point I have had very little trouble with the people at Optus.  I guess that’s becuase up until now, there has been little reason to contact them over the most contentious matter between a telco and a customer: money.

Our combined ‘phone and internet bill is usually around $85 per month. Pretty good.  But a few days ago we got our Optus bill: a whopping $360+!

When I looked at our daily usage, I saw that 1775mb had been used on New Year’s Eve (a day that we were out for 1/2 the day), and that in previous months our usage had barely reached 200mb on our busiest day.  “Aha”, says I, “something is amiss.  The good people at Optus will have an answer for this!”  So, naively, I called the good people at Optus.  Well, they shuffled me on to some guy at “faults”.  He looked at the details and was able to tell me that not only did the 1775mb occur on New Year’s Eve, but it occurred between 10pm - midnight. 

“Hmm,” says I, “actually wasn’t home then.”

“Oh,” says Fault Man, “then you must not have a password and somebody has stolen your downloads.”

But I do have a password.  And encryption.  But this sort of thing does not interest the good people at Optus.  They take no responsibility for the security of what they supply.  After getting nowhere with Fault Man (I was applying logic…you know, let’s look at current usage, which has never got near the levels “recorded”, surely this could be a glitch…but Fault Man stuck to his guns…on NYE, someone was stealing my internet after 1st cracking the security installed.) I was passed on to Team Leader Girl.

Who was rude.  But who also said: “What has happened to you is a crime. We sympathise but there is nothing we can do.”

It’s a crime.  And what is Optus’ moral stand on internet theft (if indeed that’s what it was)? Optus’ stand is this: WE GLADLY PROFIT FROM CRIMES COMITTED AGAINST OUR CUSTOMERS!

Take, as a contrary example, your credit card company.  Say you live in Melbourne and buy some petrol on a Tuesday.  Then on the same Tuesday, someone in Kuala Lumpur buys a dancing Elvis figurine with your credit card.  Generally speaking, your credit card company will ring you up, inquire whether you can be in two places at once, and then take action.  THEY WILL NOT CHARGE YOU FOR THE CRIME COMITTED AGAINST YOU. Optus, on the other hand, wil do that. They probably even have paintings in their board rooms from that have been lifted from the Louvre. 

So, I rang back the next day.  Nicer service.  Not much luck though.  Wayne - who answered the ‘phone - is a self-confessed hacker, and sympathised with my plight.  He put me back to faults, who were told to help me more than they did yesterday.  Their solution? Maybe it was an automatic download from Windows…(not theft, that was the theme for Thursday, not Friday).

So no luck there.  What is scary is that not once did anyone from Optus offer to help make my system more secure, offer some sort of payment plan (we’ve been with them for the best part of 8-9 years), offer to put me through to a complaints section etc.  They just wanted to keep stonewalling so that I would give up.

Wrong guy.  Here’s my course of action:

• Find out if there is a complaints section and go to town there.
• Put together a written document and send it to high level management, detailing who I have spoken with, how little help they were and how their story changes each time (tempted to ring again to see what they new story will be…)
• Meet with someone in their Melbourne office
• Point out that I was about to up my plan, was recommending to other people that they join Optus, and then suggest I won’t be doing that.  Is $270 now worth losing $85-90 per month for the next 5 years?

If there is no luck there:

• Write to the Ombudsman, Small Claims Tribunal and send copies to Optus.
• E-mail Today Tonight, A Current Affair etc and copy Optus in.
• Write to my local MP, asking her advice on what I do next…especially since Optus think it is a crime and are still happy to profit from that.  The scary thing is - just say it happens again? A customer has no security with Optus becuase they will claim theft, and that it is not their responsibility.

Oh, and of course, continue to bag them out on my blog and Facebook page.

You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry…and my friends will tell you that the worst type of angry with me is when I am quiet, calm and logical…it’s out of character and it doesn’t blow over!

Stay tuned!

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 24th, 2009 at 3:50 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.