Dell Found Guilty of Fraud, False Advertising

Last year, the Attorney General of New York instigated a lawsuit against Dell for practices like long hold times, repeated call transfers, and disconnects for customers waiting for phone support — all of which make it harder to cash in on promises of (and paid-for) technical support." Now, raptor78 writes "IDG News reports on New York Attorney General's victory over the poor services and deceptive practices employed by Dell over the past years with regards to technical support and promotional offers. It is about time someone spoke up and realized some of the horrors people deal with at Dell." Another reader points to a quick report from Fortune magazine on the ruling.

Comments

Triumph or tragedy?

[Bombula]

While it's great that a big corporation is being held liable for false advertising, aren't there worse examples out there than computer technical support? What about false advertising for medicines, diets, and health-related products and services? Alternative medicine is one gigantic - and very dangerous - scam. What about all the food product labeling - low fat, organic, and all that meaningless garbage that is totally deceptive? And what about the goddamn P3N15 3nlArgment pi11s I paid through the nose for - those farking things didn't work AT ALL!

Re:Triumph or tragedy?

[SatanicPuppy]

So holding a company accountable is a bad thing because they didn't hold every company accountable at the same time?

Whenever one company is held accountable it makes it easier for others to be held accountable.

Anyway, the class action suits do a decent job of holding big pharma in check. Juries just don't give out the same awards because your computer repair was a couple of days late.

Dude! Yer gettin' a slap on the wrist.

[spun]

Simple games theory. If the expected payoff of fraud is greater than the penalty, fraud is inevitable. Here's a thought: instead of fines, revoke the corporate charter for serious crimes. Only in America can people still get the death penalty while corporations can't.

Re:Dude! Yer gettin' a slap on the wrist.

[AshtangiMan]

This is a great idea. I think one of the worst things that happened to American corporate culture was the removal of the periodic renewall of the charter. This was put to a general vote of the region hosting the corporation, and gave the people a chance to revoke a corporations charter because of poor business practices, excessive polluting, or some other offensive behavior. This would be good for market based capitalism, as it would provide not only an incentive to do "good" for the region, but give small companies a chance to swoop in and take over for the bloated corporate entities that spiraled into the profit optimized corruption model.

Re:Dude! Yer gettin' a slap on the wrist.

[Martin Blank]

Do you know how many thousands of corporations there are in California alone? How would we gather the necessary knowledge? What's to keep someone rich from funding a campaign to highlight some minimal yet slightly gray conduct of a much smaller competitor in order to force their dissolution?

That kind of thing is much better handled by the system in place now.

Re:Dude! Yer gettin' a slap on the wrist.

[GaratNW]

Well.. where do you draw the line for defining murder? If you're driving a Ford pickup, and it randomly explodes due to a fuel line problem, and it kills you. Your family will probably get a lot of money from that. Then they have a recall because it's killed 200 people over 3 years. That ranks up there with the worst serial killers of all time. They'll walk away with a lot of cash settlements, a product recall and a lot of PR work to do. And then they'll probably have the same thing happen 15 years later. No, I'm not citing a specific example, but car recalls like this have occurred. Most of those companies are still steamrolling ahead. By that view, if you want to commit murder, creating a faulty product that kills people is certainly the best way to get away with it.

Re:Dude! Yer gettin' a slap on the wrist.

[Jimmy_B]

Here's a thought: instead of fines, revoke the corporate charter for serious crimes. Only in America can people still get the death penalty while corporations can't.

Sounds great in theory, but would be terribly destructive; the actions of a few bad apples could cost thousands of people their jobs. A better solution is to replace the corporation's government; make all outstanding shares non-voting (thus stripping the board and the investors of their power) and hold an election for company CEO, with the old board ineligible and low-level employees making up most of the vote.

Re:This is a no-brainer

[Feanturi]

Heh, there are plenty of Americans that are difficult to understand, especially as you go further south. The ones that pronounce the letter "R" with two syllables drive me nuts (sounds almost like they're attempting to say "error"), and there's usually a lot of "could you rephrase that please?" coming from me. Pronunciation aside, there are also quite a few Americans that have such horrible grammar that you need a linguistics degree to figure out what they are trying to communicate.

Re:It's just business?

[Feanturi]

And I'll tell you right now that their testing/training does not qualify someone to actually work on their products. You really need the hands-on experience, which you don't get with their testing/training process.

I can attest to this - I worked for Dell for three years until they just recently shut down our call center (the Edmonton site, in Canada - curse our rising dollar!). For the past year my job was to field calls from the onsite technicians Dell sends out to fix laser printers. They'd call in having no idea what they were supposed to do, and would frequently make the problem worse in their struggles, prompting me to replace the whole printer rather than trying to replace the parts the tech broke, since it would just be the same inexperienced/untrainable tech going back out with the new parts. It wasn't always a training or documentation issue either though, these contracted locals were often bottom-of-the-barrel labor force types that had no concept of basic troubleshooting. You get what you pay for.

Re:It's just business?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dell doesn't do onsite service. They outsource it to Unisys and BancTec. Don't expect better service from HP as they do the same.

As far as quality of the actual systems goes, all of the pieces, if not the final assembly, are done by ASUS, Foxconn and a handful of other overseas companies. Dell and HP are marketing and distribution companies.

Anecdotal evidence of support problems will not prove a case either way. Statistically all of the major hardware companies are very similar. Shipments to support cases is around 4%.

The reason everyone (and I do mean everyone) has shitty support. Is that tech support is a shit job. Anyone who has ever worked the phones will tell you this. Most techs last around 6 months to a year. Consumer support, speaking with the unwashed masses, 8 to 12 hours a day, trying to squeeze bits of useful information out of the lady on the other end of the line who thinks her monitor is her computer. Who installed Microsoft Live Support AND Norton 360 with all the addons even though their system with Preloaded with McAfee. The guy sticking floppy disks in jewel cases and shoving them in the CD drive. Angry people trying to get you too pay their phone bill because they downloaded a porn dialer. The guy with wire snips trying to cut his AGP video card to make it fit in a PCI Express slot. Who is pissed off because everyone keeps telling him he can't.

*twitch*

Anyone that even comes close to having a clue will find a better job. I promise.