Sky News exposes repair shops

[mattx]

This may have been posted before - apologies if it has.

 

[joe90bass]

A bit worrying!

[webman]

Ridiculous. Gives us all a bad name

[tech_guy]

That's what happens when you take your laptop to be fixed along tcr...

[joe90bass]

Ridiculous. Gives us all a bad name

 

Certainly does, and it's most definitely a breach of trust. Problem is knowing how much people use IT these days, and what they store on their PC, for some unscrupulous it's just too tempting

[tech_guy]

A friend used to work on a contract for a major company and he was horrified by the behaviour of some of the staff - the first thing they would do when they got a computer in for repair was go through all the pictures and copy all the music. Some of them used to read any documents that had interesting sounding names. The management used to turn a blind eye.

[TopBanana]

A friend used to work on a contract for a major company and he was horrified by the behaviour of some of the staff - the first thing they would do when they got a computer in for repair was go through all the pictures and copy all the music. Some of them used to read any documents that had interesting sounding names. The management used to turn a blind eye.

 

thats terrible, we have a retail side to our company and strict guidlines on customers data ect, our workshop is massed with CCTV and any employee caught delving into personal files will be dismissed imediatley

[MK-2]

that one with the bank details must be absolutely thick.

if he logged in, he must have then connected to a network somehow to get the laptop online, and say he got in to the bank account, then what? you transfer out 20k to your account, well thats inconspicuous! and even if it let you, the transaction will be logged with time/date/ip so again leading back to you.

 

i loved how pc world ripped them off. do you want a £400 laptop for £599, do you want to buy a rubbish printer that you'll need to replace in 6 months? where in the world? pissy world

[localzuk]

This is why there should be some form of licensing body for these sort of shops. Every industry always claims that they can police themselves etc... but they never do.

[Tyiell]

Ah, so doing this sort of thing is illegal and inappropriate is it? Oooh, I just figured they deserved it coz they left it there to be seen. Gulp...

 

Kidding (obviously) - sickening what people will try to pull on the unsuspecting...

[Jamman960]

Its annoying that every single one of those including PC World diagnosed a faulty mobo rather than the memory chip... I doubt there are many techs who wouldn't have been able to fix such an obvious fault within 5 minutes including the time it took to make a cuppa - power on, 3 beeps, lets check the memory!

 

I guess its just like garages, we in the know can pretty much tell the customer anything we like and 99% of the time they'll believe whatever we say and still thank us even if we had screwed them over atleast its slightly more in the open now.

[Fatmas]

Before going to Uni and ending up in Education, I worked part-time in a couple of retail based IT repair shops over 5 years. I have to say I'm shocked at the out right deceit that went on in this video.

 

If a customer comes in with a loose memory chip, you sort it and charge the minimum diagnosis fee. Usually around £15 but quite often for something like that we would just do it for nothing.

 

If we were doing a data backup for a customer onto our own backup media we would sometimes glance at folders to get a general idea of the type of media, size and make sure there wasn't anything obviously illegal (We once encountered word files and pictures in the root of a customer's my documents that we had to get the police involved with but that's another story). We never actively looked through files and pictures however.

 

Customers who come in with problems are often not very computer literate so a large amount of trust is placed in us to correctly identify the problem and keep their equipment and data secure. Those cowboys are giving the industry a bad name.

[TwoZeroAlpha]

Think I saw this a fair while back, but still shocking. I would say I can't believe people would do that but I guess that's not true.

 

I've had to recover documents for private clients before, and always just dump the main docs folder to DVD with instructions on how to sort it out from there, there's no way I'm going delving into personal pictures/docs etc, the mind boggles.

[sippo]

In any business there will be crooks and cowboys. That's life unfortunately. I've known garages to rip people off, I've been ripped off by plumbers.

 

There's no excuse, but it will always happen no matter what.

[OverWorked]

The report mentions "the trade body representing many of the country's computer repair shops". I didn't know there was one. What is it called?

[joe90bass]

The report mentions "the trade body representing many of the country's computer repair shops". I didn't know there was one. What is it called?

 

PC World/Tech guys!?