Complaining to a company on Twitter can often be a pointless endeavor, like trying to have a phone conversation in the front row of a Motörhead concert, but something inside us hopes that our gripe will be heard, which is why pranksters have repeatedly been able to trick Comcast customers into believing the company is proactively calling them in response to their Tweets. The latest story involves a customer who was actually convinced to delete his anti-Comcast comments by someone pretending to be from the company.
Speaking to Gimlet Media’s Reply All, a man named Chris says he was taken in by a woman named Kendra who called claiming to be from Comcast’s social media team.
Given Comcast’s less-than-stellar reputation, especially among the online community, and the company’s public claims that it’s really trying to improve its service, one might be willing to believe that Comcast would take the step of reaching out to a disgruntled customer to resolve the situation.
But Kendra didn’t do that.
Chris says she asked if the problem he’d Tweeted about had been dealt with. “So I told her, yeah I’m pretty sure the issue was resolved, and she said, ‘Well, since your issue was resolved I was hoping that maybe we could get you to delete the Tweet because it is slanderous towards Comcast.”
First, a defamatory Tweet would be libel, not slander. Second, if a statement is true it’s not defamatory, even if the issue has since been resolved. At this point, Chris should have realized he was being pranked and simply hung up. But he remained on the line and things only got more interesting.
He says that Kendra gave the example of someone Tweeting negatively about their ex-girlfriend with a statement like, “This girl’s being such a dickhole.” If you later get back together with that ex, argued Kendra, “she would be really offended if that Tweet was still there.”
When Chris challenged Kendra on her outlandish understanding of the situation and her use of colorful language, he says she told him, “Sir, I just finished our two-week training and I’m literally reading right off the script.”
She then told Chris that maybe he’s not the kind of customer that Comcast wants to have.
“Sir, I can not end this session until the Tweet is deleted,” Kendra explained, according to Chris, who initially refused. Then Kendra said a note would be put “on his file” and he would either be “fined or removed from Comcast as a customer.”
An irate Chris agreed to delete the Tweet in hopes of ending this nonsense. But Kendra then upped her demands, saying he now needed to delete any other Tweets that referenced the one he’d deleted.
While he sought out those other posts, she asked him, “Are you just playing dumb with me? Do you think I’m stupid? The Tweets are right there.”
That’s when he hung up in frustration. At the same time, he thought he’d been treated so outrageously that he’d get the same “we’re super sorry, here’s free service” treatment that Comcast gave to customers whose names were changed to things like “A**hole Brown,” and “Dummy.”
But that wasn’t about to happen because the caller had nothing to do with Comcast. She’d done what other prank caller had done before her — trolled the Comcast Twitter feed looking for customers and calling ones whose phone numbers were publicly available.
And the customers’ numbers may not even have to be in a phone book. One longtime prank caller tells Reply All that if you know what to say to the folks at Comcast you can get them to hand over customer numbers pretty easily.
“You can call Comcast and say, ‘Hey, I’m in a different department, and you’re having computer problems so pull up the last few orders you just did and give me all the information.
“I really want to know what the point of it was,” says Chris, who believes it might have been a failed scam attempt.
But the odds are this was just someone out to amuse themselves and possibly their friends. It’s a game to see how long the caller can string along the other person, escalating the outrageousness, before being hung up on.
You can check out the entire story, along with an interview with Comcast’s head of security here:
