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Bad PC Sales Staff Exposed
Barence writes "An undercover investigation has revealed how Dell's online sales staff take liberties with the truth when trying to sell customers new PCs. One member of staff told an undercover reporter that he would need a PC with a good graphics card to download digital photos. Another, who was more incompetent than devious, was asked how many photos could be stored on a 250GB hard disk. 'Its[sic] on average 2 MB then 1024 MB * 2,' came the bewildering reply. Meanwhile, a sales assistant at supermarket Tesco told the reporter that netbooks got their name because 'a Japanese man on a plane fell asleep with a laptop on his thighs and was horribly burned, so the industry has dropped the name laptop.'"
Q: What's the difference between a computer salesman and a used car salesman?
A: The used car salesman knows when he is lying.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Drones who sell stuff are prone to lie about their products? HAS THE PRESIDENT BEEN TOLD?
Life needs more saving throws.
PC sales staff are clueless droids - film at 11. It's been this way since PCs hit retail sales floors. Anybody with the smarts to sell a PC with competence has the smarts to not be in retail.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
The tesco one isn't so bad in fairness. The rep could well have been thinking of NOTEbook - rather than NETbook. To be honest I thought that was the reason why PC makers no longer refer to laptops as laptops, but instead notebooks - so there was no implicit liability with someone burning their special parts from keeping a hot laptop in lap.
And of course like a noob I just read the article and indeed that is what happened - the rep thought notebook - and the article takes a shot at the rep for saying a netbook is: "They're just small notebooks without word processors."
So now im really pissed at giving pcpro a page click.
While we, computer elites can laugh, or cry, at some of the stupid, stupid things that come out of the mouths of the sales drones - for a lot of people they are the experts. Most people neither know nor care about computers. They just want to GET STUFF DONE. They don't know or care about Gigahertz or Terabytes: just as they don't know or care about the kilo-Watt rating of their electric kettle: it's merely an appliance - it works or it doesn't.
Maybe the IT industry should look inwards on itself and consider how we've failed to educate the public about the technology we make them use. Even worse, maybe we should reflect on how we've turned a subject that has such a huge potential for good, into a nerdy hell: full of jargon, technobabble and misinformation. To the point where the sales-staff don't even know when they're talking rubbish.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Sales people's job is to move widgets. Sell more widgets == more take-home pay.
-They aren't paid to be factual.
-They aren't paid to keep the best interests of the consumer in mind.
-The job, as designed, requires no training. In fact it rewards the absence of training.
This is the same all over. Laptops, packaged investments, American health insurance. Doesn't matter.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Completely agreed. The staff at Best Buy or whatever other brick and mortar store carries computers is so completely clueless that it's comical. Why should online vendors be much different?.
I think what's worse is when the sales person is actually good and can persuade someone into buying a product they don't need. I have to go to computer stores with my Dad when he tries to buy something simple like an ethernet cable or a power strip or he'll come home with a Cisco switch and an APC rackmount battery backup.
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
the term "netbook" comes from the fact that because they are small lightweight laptops, they are much more prone to contamination than regular laptops. therefore, they require the use of hairnets during operation. why this is true requires profound technological expertise i don't have the time to educate you fools on in this venue, but suffice it to say that it has to do with the cube of the static charge carried by the contamination proportionate to the surface area of the hard drive
and i am flabbergasted and horrified evey time i see someone using their netbooks without the mandatory use of a proper hairnet. just one little hair sliding in a crack in between the keys on the keyboard! you fools
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I was shopping for a new laptop for my wife a year or two ago and browsing Circuit City (no intentions of buying there, I just like to get my hands on the products before I buy them online). One of the "salesmen" asked me if I needed help and I decided to play along. I told him I was just checking out a few models for an upcoming purchase for my wife.
Him: Will you need a Microsoft to go with it?
Me: A Microsoft what? It comes with Windows Vista, doesn't it? Microsoft makes a lot of software.
Him: Will she need any office software?
Me: Yeah, but I've got a copy of Office XP (maybe it's 2003, I don't recall) I don't use anymore since I bought a Mac, so she'll just use that.
Him: Oh, no, you can't do that. Office XP won't work on this computer
Me: Huh? It should work fine, it's recent enough, Vista works with just about anything.
Him: Nope, Office XP/2003 doesn't work on Vista at all, you need Office 2007.
Me: Are you sure that it's not just that Office 2007 works better than the older versions on Vista?
Him: No, it's not going to work at all.
And then people wonder why sales dropped through the floor when they laid off their best staff.
As we're speaking, I'm working on a laptop from a lady who came from Best Buy. The "Geek Squad" claimed that she had a failing hard drive, and that she would need to buy a new one, as well as a Windows Vista install. The only symptom was "My laptop is running slow"
One pass of Malwarebytes, thirty minutes later, a S.M.A.R.T. check, the machine is performing properly.
The trolls even left their stupid "GeekSquad" system checking software on my customer's machine. I checked the logs of the program, no found errors.
People disgust me.
fascinating video from inside Dell's phone sales team....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TROhlThs9qY
Probably better explained as an example of Hanlon's Razor ("Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity") than outright intentional deception.
What I find weird is... I walk into my nearest Best Buy: Their mobile staff is really REALLY knowledgeable; their computer staff are knee-dragging morons! Is the mobile section of Best Buy a better money maker and worth having knowledgeable staff more-so than the computer section?
There are some very knowledgeable salesmen out there. Unfortunately, they are the minority. That's because being knowledgeable is not a particularly well-rewarded attribute. Take a look at the following:
1) When you walk into Best Buy or call Dell, you've already committed yourself: you are pretty much ready to buy, or you wouldn't be there.
2) Salesmen are paid on commission. The more you spend, the more they make.
3) Most people can't define the difference between a megabyte and a megahertz.
4) If you leave without buying, the salesman will lose the commission, even if you buy later based on their advice.
Put it all together, and you have a situation where salespeople are highly motivated to spout whatever bullshit they can concoct to get you to buy the more expensive doohickey RIGHT NOW, as long as they can get you to buy it. Since people typically judge the truthfullness of other people based on the confidence that they seem to have in what they are saying, you end up with a pack of know-nothing liars who make any kind of bullshit... with confidence.
It's really not much different than the techno-babble bullshiz that they say on Star Trek - the words are unimportant, but it's important that it sound real. And since any computer that anybody buys can do pretty much whatever they need, the people are typically content with the scenario because they got something that actually does what they need. They will tend to accept this as evidence that their salesman was telling the truth in the first place.
It's a sad, sad situation, and one that's not likely to improve any time soon.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Returns are more of a pain to deal with.
Of course, that's just anecdotal stuff. Plenty of stores do give out bonus goodies (or firings) based on total money made per individual worker, and there are plenty of people that just don't anything about electronics but needed a job badly.
I know Hanlon's Razor, "never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"
' A sufficiently advanced form of incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. '
The mobile section is actually only half Best Buy, and half Carphone Warehouse. They work on a different bonus structure and different power structure than the rest of the store, which the Mobile Manager reporting directly to a district manager and skipping the General Manager of the store, unlike every other dept.
So I mountain bike. Turns out these bikes have become more and more complicated, with more and more features, and I'm at the point where I don't really care about the latest carbon-fiber whatsathinger I just want to get on my bike and go, and have it not break. But when I need to fix the bike, or buy a new one, I've got to talk to sales people some of whom have a clue and some of whom don't.
Computers are like most other reasonably complex products - you've got to do your homework and never, ever trust that the salesperson knows what they are talking about. Because most don't, whether we're talking mountain bikes or personal computers.
A knowledgeable computer person can probably find a better job. There's not so many other jobs for people who know about cell phone handsets...
'Sensible' is a curse word.
The incompetence of the sales staff at Best Buy is not restricted to the computer department. Case in point: the other night I went to look for a cordless phone with a switching power supply - i.e. something that could run on either 110V or 220V.
Looking at the shelf of phones, none of the boxes gave any indication of input voltage or being dual-voltage capable. I asked a droid which of the phones would accept 220V and he said
"All of them."
"Are you sure? All of them?"
"Any of these will work."
I looked over the phones on display until I found one with a power brick attached. It clearly said Input: 110-120V AC.
"What about this one? It says 110V AC input."
He squinted at the brick and said
"No look. It says 250 here."
I looked where he was pointing and sure enough, it said Output: 250mW 12V DC. ..."
"Okay thanks. I think I'll do some research online or something and maybe come back in tomorrow with a specific model number in hand
If these guys can't master the simple concept of input and output voltages, there really is very little hope of them navigating the world of memory bandwidth, sockets, or video performance.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
It's not just the salesmen who are clueless. People don't know what to ask for, don't know how to describe what they want out of a computer... it's a mess on both ends.
maybe we should reflect on how we've turned a subject that has such a huge potential for good, into a nerdy hell: full of jargon, technobabble and misinformation.
Right. Because fields like medicine, law, automotive repair, publishing, fashion, cooking, broadcast, engineering, carpentry, literature, mathematics, philosophy, psychology, politics, banking, insurance, etc. don't have any jargon, technobabble, or misinformation.
Every field has specialized language.
You either learn enough of the specialized language to make sure you aren't being taken for a ride, or you trust that the folks you're dealing with aren't going to abuse their position of power.
The primary difference is that many people don't feel the need to educate themselves in any way when it comes to computers. Many people seem almost proud of their ignorance. They'll happily declare that they don't know anything about computers.
Sure, they just want to get stuff done. So do I, when I get in my car and drive to the grocery store. But it's still a news story when the local repair shop is found to be lying to its customers and charging people for repairs they don't need.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
No, it's not a real "news" story. But this is Slashdot, and the mods knew that by posting that, it would become nice bait for Slashdotters to share their stories about crappy salespeople and such, so they wanted to drive more people to the site to drive more ad impressions and thereby make them more money,... Basically, the mods are motivated the same way that salespeople are motivated, but just use different techniques. That's also why I'm probably going to get modded "-1 Troll" for this,... ;-)
I had to do something fairly similar for my grandmother's computer. Only problem was, the hard drive was working perfectly fine before she took it to Best Buy. I had given her a hand-me-down computer with Linux on it, and she wanted to install Windows on it. So she had to go buy a copy. Somehow in the process of installing Windows--an arduous task that involves the opening of the DVD drive--they had managed to open the case, unscrew the hard drive from the case, and then bust it up enough that it took over 24 hours for Windows to finish installing. I know this because they kindly provided my grandmother a receipt that had logs of everything they did, which I went over.
The best part is when they decided the slowness was due to the PC not having enough RAM for XP. Which is curious, because I had run XP on that PC just fine. So they tell her they need to buy 2 x 1 GB sticks. Eventually we managed to get a refund on all of that stuff after Windows failed to boot up.
After I had to head back to my home state, she was left with no computer and, even worse, no one who even remotely knows that they're talking about with computers. She went to the same Best Buy and asked for assistance on what computer to buy. They equipped her, someone whose most intensive task is copying photos off of a camera, with a quad core desktop with like 4 or 8 GB of RAM.
SSC
A bit of a different field, but I know that whenever I am at Best Buy to pick up anything home theater related (I help out a lot of friends/relatives with HT setups) I will inevitably end up arguing with some moron trying to sell me a $140 Monster Cable so it will 'look better'. Being ignorant/a liar is one thing, but it is totally something else when they continue to argue with you about it. I have even, on one particular occasion, taken the time to explain to the clown how digital audio/video works and why purchasing the "better" cable is equivalent to lighting your money on fire, and had him still come back with, "Well, I'm sorry but you're wrong, this cable will make it look better." It is amazing to me that this sort of criminal fraud is tolerated -- these people get away with making provably false statements in order to separate people from their money and they don't see any consequences. The average person should be able to walk into a store and at least be confident that the person trying to sell them things will, at the very least, not blatantly lie, but this is not the case.
To the haters: You can't win. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
At least they're not trying to sell you a gold plated optical cable.
I just bought a new reciever and I was a bit unsure if it was the right one with enough bass, but then the guy in the shop said they could modify it with a tk-421 upgrade. They gave it 3-4 quads more per channel by adding that and they did that modification right in the store.
Plus it didn't add a lot to the price.
WTF are you talking about? That's absolutely NOT true. All versions of MS OfficeXP and 2003 are listed on the Vista compatibility pages :
https://www.microsoft.com/windows/compatibility/Browse.aspx?type=Software&category=Business%20%26%20Home%20Office&subcategory=Office%20Suites&page=2
Perhaps you should either do some research or work for Dell.
Actually, I still say that a lot of them know at least enough to know they're lying, but even that's beside the point. They should at least know they're making buzzwords up, and that it _is_ lying to a customer.
What makes it odious in my eyes is that they essentially abuse those people's trust. We may argue about how smart it is to trust the guy getting a commission to do a fair analysis of your problem, but that's essentially what those customers are doing. Some old geezer comes and explains it all to the nice sales guy, not because he just wants to give the "I'm ripe for a con job" signals loud and clear, but because they trust that they'll be given a genuine solution to their problem. Because that's how the rest of society works.
If I go to a dentist with a cavity, I expect him to tell me what's the best course of action for that problem -- e.g., just fill the hole -- not to smooth talk me into pulling the tooth out and replacing it with an expensive implant. Sure, the implant would make him more money, but the underlying expectation is that he'll solve _my_ problem not his own mortgage problem.
If I hop in a cab and ask the guy to take me to the main railway station, I expect him to take either the shortest or the fastest route, or ask which of them. I do not expect him to just run in circles for more money, although he's on a commission too.
If I call a plumber for a leaking pipe, I expect him to do essentially the minimum that solves that problem, not take it as an opportunity to invent reasons why he should replace the piping in the whole house. And if he does come up with reasons why I should replace all of it -- e.g., because it's an old house and it's lead pipes -- I expect those to be real, honest-to-FSM reasons, not made up buzzwords that just have to sound real to make a sale.
Etc.
And if your dentist, or your cabbie, or plumber, or accountant, or lawyer, took it as just an opportunity to milk the last cent they can out of you with invented buzzwords, probably most people would take them to court. Because it _is_ blatant fraud and betrayal of trust.
But somehow when a computer sales clerk does it, nah, that's ok. Sorry, it looks the same to me.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I don't mean this to be advertisement, but considering that the typical retail store and most American businesses for that matter treat the customer as some sort of nuisance, I'd like to give some good words to a company that, so far, has been treating me right. Note, as soon as they slip up I'll be the first to slam them.
Disclaimer: This is a sample of one person dealing with one store with about a dozen purchases.
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
In 1999, I worked sales at PCs For Everyone, a (now-defunct, mostly) whitebox dealer in Cambridge, MA. They were a big operation, with a stellar reputation and good draw. People would drive for hundreds of miles to get a PCsFE system. As New England's largest whitebox dealer, they had about 15 guys in the back room assembling computers on any given day, and the burn-in racks were usually backlogged. We were always busy - when we weren't selling systems we were selling parts, and we got so packed on the weekends that there was a numbered ticketing system for counter help. I worked my ass off there 5 and a half days a week (the mandatory sales meeting was on my day off) and brought in, by my own conservative estimate, about $2M in gross sales during my year working for them. You wouldn't believe how many Celeron A 300's we went through. Those things went out the door like you could get high by smoking them.
I know a lot about personal computer internals. I knew even more back then. I spent at least an hour every night reading up on Anandtech and Tom's Hardware, and the other big hardware sites of 10 years back. I helped set up the demos, and I never sold anyone more computer than I thought they could reasonably need. I did product research, recommended new kit for us to sell, and did basic troubleshooting with customers, spending 1:1 time. I had a base of dedicated customers who would wait for me rather than deal with another salesman.
When stumped, other sales reps would come to me for answers much of the time. In short, if I haven't tooted my own horn enough, I was the goddamn bomb when it came to selling computers and parts.
In that year, I made a little over $22,000, and was shafted out of my bonus . I was gone on day 380, off to a job that paid 3 times as much that I got through a customer.
Taking away for a minute from the fact that my boss / the owner was a crook (and he was), even when shafting me that hard, here's the thing: I brought in $2M to a business myself, and that business 2 years later wasjust an online storefront.
There is no margin in computer sales. Even with a locally-respected brand name that drew customers from out-of-state, even when the owner was as crooked as Quasimodo's back, even when bringing in gross revenues in the tens of millions, the storefront was gone inside of a few years.
The reason PC sales sucks is because the margins are 0. The average PC salesman doesn't make dick unless he's selling in enterprise volumes, and you're lucky if they've even taken an A+ course. Anyone who genuinely enjoys both computers and sales quickly moves into sales engineering, or finds another lateral move that will net some income. The margins on each part are nil, the margins on systems are nil. CompUSA is gone because the margins were too slim. The Best Buy rep and the Dell consumer reps are incompetent because they're given 2 days with a 3-ring binder of training, then set loose on the floor. Like it or not, qualified sales staff costs money, and anyone with the know-how to be an effective salesperson with computers is going to chase the dollar out of that basement as soon as possible.
Even Jesus hates listening to Creed.
You mean like the Rocketfish toslink cable with 24k gold plated connectors..
Yeah, they have those too:
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=7832223&type=product&id=1142297086861
"24K gold-plated connectors for corrosion resistance and enhanced signal transfer"
Brilliant.
-Matt
This is a nasty problem because computers are not quite a commodity and not quite a geeky lab tool. People think of them as a commodity and companies try to sell them as a commodity but they require more care and feeding than say your toaster, microwave or VCR. Frankly if my VCR was as finicky and required the level of hand-holding (think frequent patching, etc) that my computer does, I'd toss it in the bin and get a new one.
It's a problem from both ends. Simple gadgets like a toaster do one established thing pretty much one way. Everybody has the same expectation of the outcome and anticipates the process pretty much the same. So we are intrinsically "trained" to know what to look for in the purchase of a toaster. Computers don't have such clearcut uses and functional pathways. This means that even tech savvy people are a bit lost in what they want from a computer (I'm agonizing on my next media server: atom or other processor, mirroring or raid 6, which case, hot-swap, etc). Combine this with sales staff whose knowledge matches their pay, and you have a recipe for chaos.
We complain bitch and moan about poorly trained sales staff, but at the same time, we want the widget at a brick and mortar store to be only ten cents more than online. We don't value well trained sales staff and good customer service. Some of us say we do, but "we" as a society feed our money to best-buy and wall-marts while many local higher caliber stores suffer and die because the prices are too high (which they have to be to cover the staff, etc). We are voting for crap employees with our wallets.
This extends to Dell online, they are leading the race to the bottom of computer sales. I suspect if you call up PSSC, you'll get somebody who knows something, but expect to pay more.
Sheldon
my husband works with a man that used to work for geek squad. He was fired after reporting that fellow geek's were stealing memory and hardware from unsuspecting clients. According to his departure paper, he was fired for not being a team player. Best buy and the geek squad are a bunch of thieves.
Your analogy doesn't really work.
My analogy? What analogy?
I pointed out that other fields have technical jargon as well.
I pointed out that people seem almost prideful of their ignorance in regard to computers. Which strikes me as odd.
And I pointed out that in any technical field you have a choice of either educating yourself or trusting the folks you deal with.
The only bit that was even vaguely analogous was when I pointed out that in any field it is a news story when people are taken advantage of.
How many people, for example, go to the doctor and expect to be told about things like cytokine storms or acetylsalicylic acid? To most people, these terms are just as meaningless as gigahertz or terabytes, if not more so. The doctor is paid so that they don't have to know these things. Part of his job is to translate these terms into things a layman can understand.
All very true.
But that doesn't change the fact that you have to either educate yourself, or trust that your doctor knows what they're talking about.
And it is still news if some doctor has been misleading patients.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
>>>Somehow in the process of installing Windows--an arduous task that involves the opening of the DVD drive--they had managed to open the case, unscrew the hard drive from the case, and then bust it up enough that it took over 24 hours for Windows to finish installing.
>>>
They probably got confused when they saw Linux.
I think I would file fraud charges against this company. If they are doing that to your grandma, just imagine who else they are screwing.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
In the investigation they even found some Dell outlets were selling computers to pimps and prostitutes, even after they explained that they were going to use the computers to keep track of illegal alien prostitutes.
Wattage. Voltage. Its just numbers on the box, man. You shouldn't be so picky, God, I hate these customers. Oh well, time to go on break and smoke a fatty behind the store with Tim from stereos.
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
Depends by "questionable", I've had many bottom-line computers keep chugging right along while I've had high-end systems fail quicker. In fact, I prefer buying the cheaper hardware because there is usually less proprietary crap and components are usually a lot easier to swap out.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
They equipped her, someone whose most intensive task is copying photos off of a camera, with a quad core desktop with like 4 or 8 GB of RAM.
So they were getting her ready for doing the same task on Windows 7? I would thank them.
Sears, Roebuck salespeople are on commission, at least in the appliances and electronics departments. If anything, I think you get better service from them, but they definitely try to steer you to their highest-margin stuff.
They have to at least TRY to upsell. In fact, it is good salesmanship to start with the high end. You do not want to offend people by assuming they can only afford the wash tub and clothesline model.
;)
Being an educated consumer does not stop with computers. The consumer should know the rules by their 18th birthday. You want to buy, they want to sell; when you meet in the middle a deal is struck. Remember, the hallmark of a successful negotiation is when both parties walk away slightly unhappy.
I sold paint for a number of years on partial commission (don't ask what that means). We had a very moral knowledgeable staff of 4. Our numbers were high and steady even in the CY first quarter simply because of repeat business (few people paint in the Winter, but more than you'd think). We would actually inform our big buyers when pending sales/promotions were occurring. Often we would get very large orders that we could place ahead of time to have stock on hand for the promotion--they didn't have ERP systems 25 years ago.
Same here, and the worst part is, my dad was a CAR SALESMAN for 25 years (both new and used). You'd think he could recognize the smell of bullshit.
Don't you realize how our senses work? For the most part they pick out contrasts. This is why camouflage works. It's also why you can walk into the kitchen on a cool day, and know where the stove is, just by the radiated heat. If however, the room was on fire, that trick wouldn't work.
In other words. A used car salesman's BS detector is so saturated with internally generated noise that he has little chance of ever detecting BS around him.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
+1 Depressing
Yeah my sister got a virus on her new PC and brought it to the Geek Squad. They told her she needed her hard drive wiped, but she had already spoken to me and I told her to hand them this piece of paper with the name of the virus on it- and for them to get the proper removal instructions and clean it off- no formatting the HD! (I didn't have time to do it).
They came back to her afterwards and said "Gee, that was easier than we though it would be!". *face palm*
I worked at a Mom & Pop computer repair place for two years. We had a retired electrical engineer professor (phd in EE) who did laptop mobo repairs. He was just happy to get out of the house and have some guys to hang around with while soldering power plug connectors back together. There was an ex-HP guy doing printer repairs and the boss who, while not a great out-of-box thinker, had a hell of a memory for parts and settings. Cool thing was, Christmas: $500 bonus and dinner out with open bar on $18/hr salary. The rest of my tech job history has been at corporate places and never got any type of bonus like that.
I drank what? -- Socrates
You also can't be fired when you're trying to report a crime (theft of customer property). That's why I mentioned the whistle blower law that's supposed to protect employees when they report illegal acts performed by a company.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Several years ago, I was working in computer repair at a locally owned business "competing" with the Geek Squad and a few others. And by "competing", I mean we were the place people came to get their computers fixed after the Geek Squad fucked them up even more.
During my time working there, I had written several custom diagnostic tools, and eventually a handy front end for them so we could have a single disc with most of what we used daily on it. The front end was configurable to some degree, so we could add new tools without having to recompile the front end as well. Unfortunately, as tends to happen, periodically some of these discs would get left in a CD-ROM drive when a computer went back out.
A few months after I originally created it, we got a computer in from someone who had recently taken it to the Geek Squad. In their CD-ROM drive was a utility disc from there. Upon further investigation, it was a CD running my front end that had been slightly modified to make it look like their own software. In one part of the program that doesn't get used frequently, it even still had the name of the company I worked for. So, as many others have said, they really are thieves.