Undercover Cameras Catch PC Repair Scams, Privacy Violations

Barence writes "With help from readers of PC Pro, Sky News in the UK launched an undercover investigation into rogue PC repair shops. As a result, Sky's cameras caught technicians scouring through private photos, stealing passwords and over-charging for basic repairs. It was a simple enough job: 'To create the fault, we simply loosened one of the memory chips so Windows wouldn't load. To get things working again, one needs only push the chip back into the slot and reboot the machine. Any half-way competent engineers should fix it in minutes.' But these technicians had other ideas, stealing photos and documents, as well as login details for email and bank accounts."

Comments

Deliberately breaking the motherboard?

[pjt33]

While the stuff all the reports are picking up on is certainly not good, the most shocking bit is near the end of the article:

Meanwhile, at Evnova Computers in Barbican the loose memory chip was also spotted and fixed. But the company also told us we needed a new motherboard. We declined the offer and collected our laptop. When we examined it, we discovered technicians had soldered the memory bus pins together to recreate the original fault. Evnova later claimed it believed we were from a rival repair company.

So they catch onto the fact that it's not a genuine customer and they think that a bit of criminal damage is the best thing to do?

Re:Deliberately breaking the motherboard?

[jorghis]

+5 Gullible. :) It is very unlikely that they realized it wasnt a legit customer. If they had realized they were being watched they probably would have been on their best behaviour. That sounds more like an excuse than anything. More likely is that they were afraid the customer would go someplace else and get it fixed without needing a new motherboard thus discovering that Evnova's advice was bad. So they broke the motherboard on purpose to make their claim that a new motherboard was needed more credible and likely to be confirmed by the next shop.

PC Repair Scams

[Reason58]

You mean to tell me the kind of shop that would charge $50 to install a stick of RAM might behave in a less than ethical manner? NO!

Re:Surprising?

[Renraku]

If they were being paid a decent wage, maybe they'd actually care about their jobs. Or, God forbid, take a little pride in it. Substandard pay will get you substandard workers. Even in this shitty economy we're in, there's no free lunch when it comes to the wage-worthiness continuum.

Not just in UK.

[wvmarle]

Just an example of in this case images copied from a laptop that was taken for repair. For anyone living in Hong Kong or following Cantopop, just think "Edison Chen". You will know what I'm talking about, it has been all over the media for a long long time.

For the rest of us: this is a famous singer/actor/etc around here. He took his laptop for repair once, and a year or so ago photos of him having sex with female stars started to appear on the Internet. Copied off of his laptop by the repairman who started snooping around the data on the hard disk after the repairs were finished. This repairman has got a jail term for that, by the way. And it all ballooned in the biggest entertainment story of cantopop in 2008, and probably the biggest in cantopop history.

For links: just search for "edison chen" on google. The first top-100 or so are about this scandal.

Re:Big deal

[ls671]

Well, I tell people that I am outdated with regards to fixing computers, I used to do it when I started to play with computers but now the time I would spend fixing my aunt virus infected computer would make me loose too much money compared to spending that time on my regular work.

So maybe competent people do not want to do this kind of work, I don't anyway...

They have stopped to call me since a while and this is a good thing, charging them more than the price of the computer to fix it wouldn't fly and that is what it costs me in lost income ;-))

My experience in China

[DNS-and-BIND]

We needed a memory upgrade from 512M to 2G to run Adobe Illustrator. So I call the computer market to send over a guy to do the job. Screw it, I'm not touching computer parts if I can help it. The computer guy comes over, replaces the motherboard/CPU and puts new RAM in. I see him put only 1 stick in, which concerns me. Computer boots up fine, he wants to leave. I say, hold on there Tex, let's make sure this works. I check the POST screen and it reports 1G memory. I tell this to the guy in Chinese. "Hey, you forgot to bring one of the RAM sticks, there's only 1G in here." He says, (jedi hand wave) no, there is 2G RAM in the machine. I say, no look here, it's reporting only 1G, you have to go back and get the other stick of RAM. He says, (jedi hand wave) no, the video card is taking up the extra space. At this point I get angry and show him where the BIOS reports 128M for the video card. He says he'll come back tomorrow with the other stick.

I wonder how many times he got away with this, taking the extra cash for himself. I reported the scam to his boss, but the boss wasn't very excited about it. He was probably in on the scam, too. Heck, it was probably his idea. Most office customers wouldn't know 2G RAM from a RAID array. Just another example of the sort of automatic fraud from vendors that you have to constantly be aware of in China (and elsewhere).

Re:Halfway Competent

[ILuvRamen]

Hold on a second there. I'm an independent repairer (non-shady one) and my main problem with all the "official" ones like Geek Squad is they're a little reinstall happy. Unless system files are missing or damaged, I never reinstall windows. It's not that hard to automatically then manually remove any trace of incompatible software or any malware. Their big thing is that it'd take 4 hours of labor to fix the problem or 3 to reinstall windows and back up all their data first. I charge so little for labor that it doesn't really matter and then they get to keep all their software instead of spending a week reinstalling everything, half of which they lost the discs for.
Oh and you're not a very good repairer if you're just guessing at parts. If you can't tell the difference between a broken power supply, motherboard, or ram then you don't know what you're doing.

Re:Surprising?

[techess]

I think you have an excellent point. I've been involved with the hiring process of the IT people I work with (an even our current IT manager). I tend to choose those that seem honest in the interview. The HR/non-techs tend to be impressed by the "big talkers". When we talk after the people I rate the highest they usually rate the lowest and vice versa.

We do a Q/A interview first and then we do a hands on interview where we make them show that they can do all the stuff they listed in their resume or said they could do in the Q/A portion. It is amazing the amount of lies people tell in an interview (and not just exaggeration, but blatant lies about their skills). People who are honest in their interview have, in our experience, been honest employees.

Most people can be taught to do low end "geek squad" style tech support, but you can't teach someone to be honest. It isn't based on pay either. Someone who will cheat and steal in a $7/hr job will do the same if they are making $30.

This is true

[Sycraft-fu]

It is something Costco has discovered: They have less shrinkage (theft) than normal. Why? They pay their employees well and have good benefits. Thus while it doesn't mean nobody ever steals from them, it means it happens less than at similar stores. The reason is threefold:

1) People like and care about their job more because it pays well, and thus don't want to do things that might mess it up. So even if they are somewhat morally dubious, they may elect not to risk their job.

2) Their employees have more money and thus less incentive to steal. When you are flat broke, theft can seem like a good option. When you can afford what you want, it isn't as attractive.

3) They have more goodwill towards their employer. They feel like their employer cares about them so they care about their employer. Most people have a much easier time screwing someone over if they don't know them or dislike them.

It really DOES seem to work. Also, it tends to reduce turnover. With minimum wage, you have an extremely high turnover rate. People come and go all the time. As you increase pay, you increase the amount of time people will stay with you. The reason this matters to an employer is that it costs money to train new employees. Even on menial jobs, you don't walk in and have 100% efficiency on day one. This applies even if you've done similar work before. Every setup is different, it takes time to train up people.

Again something Costco has discovered. The interesting thing is that the two factors (lower theft and turnover) seem to add up for them and largely offset the higher costs for employees. Yes, they pay out more, but it reduces other costs and thus doesn't end up hitting the bottom line as much as you might first expect.

This has already been done before

[Runefox]

The CBC did a documentary called "Getting Gouged by Geeks" of precisely the same thing, with almost precisely the same fault - Instead of loosening the chip, the module itself was blown in such a way that the computer didn't power on. Unfortunately, CBC had high standards - even one guy who had figured it out, and honestly fixed it, was considered to be "gouging" because he only had a larger module than what needed replacing - Let's not even mention that they expected him to do a house call for free and give them a memory module for the going price online. There were plenty of examples of others who weren't so legit, though.

You can see it here. Interestingly, Slashdot ran a story on it.

Re:Halfway Competent

[hairyfeet]

The really sad part is why they will never bust the shops for it here in the USA. Child porn. How many times have you read about some perv sends his PC to Worst Buy and gets busted for child porn? Want to know why they always get busted for it?

Because half the guys at these shops, and I'd say a good 85% of the ones working at worst buy from what I've been told by guys that worked there, carry USB HDDs with batch files set up to scour PCs for *.jpg, *.avi, etc. While some are looking for cc in info as well nearly all of them are looking for vids pics and tunes to rip off. That is why I run my own little shop. Doesn't pay as well, but I don't feel like a sleazebag either. Did any of my customers have child porn? I wouldn't know, because I only go to the desktop and Windows folder. I also warn my customers beforehand if there is something they wouldn't their grandma to see in there don't ask me to back up My Documents, since I will be seeing all the file names if I run a backup. So the worst I've had to deal with is some girl who liked to take pics of herself with her webcam and couldn't get the PC to boot to desktop. Do I have copies? Nope, wasn't none of my business so I didn't look at them. She simply told me beforehand after I gave her my granny speech.

But as long as the sleazebags working at places like Worst Buy call the cops whenever they find any child porn nobody will ever bust them. Cops don't bust good snitches, even when the snitch is doing illegal activity like looking for cc info and other stuff to steal. Best Buy corporate? Not going to bust them as long as they are willing to work for those shitty wages. So sadly while I don't know how it is in the UK, here the sleazebags will be able to do whatever they want as long as they throw the cops a bone once in awhile. Me? It ain't my job to prowl through somebodies PC looking for stuff to steal or snitch on, so I don't. I may have to work a little harder for me pay but at least I don't feel like a sleazebag.