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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/MinervaJB on 2024-10-03 02:40:46+00:00.

I used to work on the retentions department of an ISP back in the day. While many people called genuinely wanting to cancel their phone service, just as many knew that retentions was more than that. The ISP, let’s call them RedPhone, had two different departments. I worked on Retentions 1, where we did a lot of fixing bills and offering small discounts and slightly cheaper phones to customers who said they wanted to leave. Retentions 2 was for customers who were in the process of porting their numbers, and the worst thing they offered was a 50% discount for a couple of years with a decent phone for free.

This happened roughly ten, maybe 12 years ago when roaming was straight up highway robbery.

Let me introduce you to “The Executive”. I got the call, I did my little introductory spiel, and I immediately discovered this guy was the most entitled POS I’d ever had the displeasure to speak to. He said he was a very important executive who travelled a lot for work, but the bill he got was ridiculous and I had to solve it or he was going to cancel his service. I muted him - so he heard nothing, but I could still hear what he said, and while I checked his account, I could hear him gloat to his girlfriend that he’s getting the bill credited because he knows how to play the system.

And he was an a$$hole, but he wasn’t wrong. This guy was a pro at playing RedPhone. He had the highest phone plan the company offered, which was around 90 euro at the time for one line, but paid 30 euro per month because he had discounts from both departments stacked on top of each other. His plan allowed him to get what at the time was a super expensive phone for basically nothing at Retentions 2. He’d gotten the super shiny customer status and the super shiny customer service line (which usually meant a customer was averaging a 300 euro monthly bill) despite his 30 euro ARPU because he complained about how the delocalized customer service sucked.

He was also not wrong about his bill being ridiculous. He’d visited several EU countries, got a 600 euros bill, called customer service, and said he had not known that roaming was so expensive, no one had warned him when he told us he was travelling overseas. The company had a policy that the first time a customer complained about something, we could refund them, particularly if the complaint was that the customer had not been informed about extra charges. So the rep informed him about roaming costs and refunded him all of the roaming charges, leaving the bill at 30 euro.

Second month comes around, he kept using the phone overseas, got a 1500 euro bill. He calls customer service, they tell him they can’t refund him again. He says he wants to cancel his account then, and gets transferred to me.

He was demanding that we credited his roaming charges again, because if we can do it once we can do it again, and also because roaming prices were abusive (he did have a point there) I told him I couldn’t do that, so he wanted me to open a claim and escalate it. I refused again because there was no one to escalate to, he wasn’t going to get that credited. He insisted he wasn’t hanging up until I escalated the issue because he wasn’t informed, and if I kept the call going for much longer he was going to charge the company for his time because he was a busy man.

At this point I’d been working there long enough that if you were nice or even normal I would try my damndest to help you, but if you were a d*ck? Sorry, can’t do, get lost. Customer refuses to hang up, I can hung up. This guy, though? He’d gone past being a d*ck into total c*ntwaffle, and I was pissed off. I couldn’t be a d*ck back, but he’d been f*cking around and I could make sure he found out.

So I told him that okay, since he was so insistent I would open a claim to refund him the 1500 euro bill, and muted him while I opened the claim. The a$$hole was again gloating at his girlfriend about how clever he was because he was going to get this bill refunded too. Meanwhile, I was copypasting the notes from the previous month’s claim, where the rep had written: “I’ve informed customer of roaming charges in all the countries he told me he could be visiting (list of European countries)”. Also, stacking discounts? Very much not a thing. He had to spam the Retentions 1 call centers with calls until he got a newbie lost enough to apply another discount over his Retentions 2 discount.

And he had not read the terms and conditions of the accounts, but I had. Trying to defraud the company was grounds for service termination. I got the claim number, flagged down my supervisor and told her to please send it to headquarters in the daily report so fraud could examine the account.

I told the guy that the claim had been opened, but also that since it was obvious he was trying to abuse the company’s policies, the claim had been flagged to be reviewed by fraud and it was likely his account would be terminated. He went from entitled to worried in two seconds and asked me to close the claim. Sorry, dude, can’t do, you wanted a claim open, now it’s open.

Yes, the customer was fired.