When your customer is not himself.

[TelephoneAngel]

So, beCause we issue money payments we have to be very sure that we are actually issuing it to the right person.

As an aside, we always ask our customers to take ID to get the money, and this also causes whining as to why they don't have any ID.

This means that if I am not sure that the person I am talking to is the actual customer who is entitled to the money I will ask additional questions (it's actually quite common for people to complain that "they were going to ask for a money authorisation but then when they did they discovered that someone else already had it - usually their son, cousin, next door neighbour, etc etc)"How these people get hold of their account details i have no idea.

One day I had someone on the phone and he answered all the questions but sounded too young to be the customer.I know some people have young voices but this was very young.He was calling from a mobile. On a hunch I put the caller on hold, went to another phone and called the landland number on the account.The real customer answered, apparently it was his son who was on the other line with me attempting to scam his own father out of the authorisation money!!!!!

[Sapphire Silk]

I hope dad kept you on the line long enough to confront his son as you took him off hold

[JustaCashier]

I hope dad kept you on the line long enough to confront his son as you took him off hold

OMG Yes!!

That would have been a perfect "fly on the wall" moment!

Mike

[DGoddessChardonnay]

Be glad you're not a 911 dispatcher . . . you might have been getting a call from the Dad requesting an ambulance at that residence.

[bainsidhe]

Time for people to change their personal info.

[bankworking]

Had a member who's personal info got stolen. SSN, name, address, birthdate. The would-be thief had all of it. We know, because he kept calling up our call center trying to 1) change the account address to something else and have us mail a new credit card or 2) authorize a wire transfer over the phone. He knew everything except the actual account number, and since so many people don't know their account numbers, the info he had was enough to "verify" the member.

Fortunately we have a policy that 1) credit cards cannot be authorized via phone to be sent to addresses that have been changed via phone in the past 30 days and 2) wire transfers above $3000 have a follow-up verification call to the phone number on the account (and if that number has been changed recently, we call the old one, just in case). So, every time the thief tried something, we stopped the transaction before it went through. Then the member authorized a block on the account so nothing could be done on it via phone without a supervisor override.

Nice end to the story. Even though all the addresses given were abandoned houses, it gave the police enough info to help track the ring of thieves down (wasn't just our member being targeted). I got to talk to the police officer about the fact that all our calls were recorded and we were already having the tapes held in wait for the subpoena to reach the proper department. I know the thieves were caught. Hope they nailed them to the wall.

[PepperElf]

woot. im sure the police were happy to have such awesome cooperation too =)

and yeah ooh to be a fly on the wall when that guy found out his son what his son was doing

[MoonChild2007]

This is what really pisses me off about this, some customers get all upset (probably because they got caught) whenever we don't make changes because they are not the account holder nor an authorized user. Its like you can never win

We ask for ID, customer gets upset
We don't ask for ID, they get upset
we tell them they are not account holder- they get upset
the account holder gets upset because we let somebody else make changes to their account

its like, come on! Our company should really, really have a better security system like a four digit acct pin when they call in. That will stop all the escalations because the customer is upset because they can't make changes on an account that does not belong to them

[Eddyisme]

Ugg the human race.

Why can't people just say "oh okay i'll come back when i have my ID" if they don't have it!.

[XCashier]

Why can't people just say "oh okay i'll come back when i have my ID" if they don't have it!.

That's too logical. It requires coming out of the "me" zone long enough to think about the problem.