Skip to main content

Being Scammed

I watched Compliance recently and was struck by how an entire group of people could be scammed and how the same tactics worked with many such groups of people. Scamming one random person is way easier than this. Around the same time as watching the movie, I started to receive order delivery confirmations for someone in Rajasthan whose first name is the same as mine. Each time I wrote to the delivery company (yet another wannabe UberEats like startup that is dreaming of the big league) to take me off their customer database. They dutifully opened a ticket and did nothing else. The fifth time this happened I wrote directly to the CEO and got this very bizarre response from one of his underlings:

As we connected with the customer who is using your email id, it's been informed that she is your friend, also the person took the email owner on a conference call and was confirmed on a recorded call that deactivation is not required as you both know each other hence we need to connect with you over a call and resolve the issue. Kindly request you to share your contact details so that we can connect with you and resolve the issue. Awaiting your response.

I proceeded to block the company from my mailbox and reported them to FTC. If I had more time or patience to dedicate to this stupidity I may have done more to deter them from doing what they were doing. The experience left me baffled by the level of bold-faced thievery of customer data this outfit was indulging in. 

The CEO in question is considered one of the rising stars in the desi startup land (but there are countless such stars that handily turn to mud and dust). The educational credentials on the guy were stellar but the resume not as much other than this sketchy start-up that had apparently gained some traction. I hope my namesake in Rajasthan is not being robbed blind and having her identity stolen by this company for good measure.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha...
5 comments
Read more

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more