BT Support Touting Private Firm for PC Help

At a party today I heard someone phoned BT Support in India to help solve a connection problem, which I think was just he couldn't get his email to work, and, after a long period when they couldn't solve it, they referred him to some firm, not Openreach, to help him for a price. This firm then remotely connected to his PC and configured his email settings, so they said, and charged him over £100 .

Anyone heard of this happening? I immediately thought it a scam, both on part of BT India and this firm. I hate to think what the state of his PC is now.

There is a fine line between an ISP helping to get the broadband and other aspects of a service working, and acting being the personal IT assistant to millions.

Thus if this was configuring the BT email services on a BT Retail connection I would expect BT Retail to do it as part of normal support. Referring to a third party firm would have resulted in all manner of agreements from the customer.

Sounds more like urban myth/scam/confusion.

Not BT India. (Is there such a thing? Though I understand what you mean).

A rogue employee of the call centre company. Or maybe he was getting well behind with his target problem handling so did it just to get rid of the guy. An extremely bad thing to do, but not entirely roguish.

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

Thus if this was configuring the BT email services on a BT Retail connection I would expect BT Retail to do it as part of normal support. Referring to a third party firm would have resulted in all manner of agreements from the customer.

I read that some ISPs are selling "tech support" for other IT problems, as they really don't want to be fixing the whole PC just to get an internet connection working. The problem being where do you draw the line.

http://bt.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/7027/...

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

A rogue employee of the call centre company.

I am not convinced. Lately I have got the impression that this is more widespread. In my recent dealings with them in querying errors in 2 phone bills, their immediate reaction was to tell 5 lies between them with the intent of deceiving user into thinking there were not errors, when he had documentary proof that there were errors, rather than directly addressing issue at hand. Both agent and their Supervisor told same lies.

It was only when I complained and spoke to Brits that sense prevailed .

If that is incontrovertibly true, I reckon it's an HLC matter. No messing.

Can you tell us what HLC is, please? Answers on Google don't make sense.

High Level Complaints (at a guess)

The problem being where do you draw the line.

Indeed. Doing tech support for an ISP one might be happy with a ping and DNS resolution working from the command line, even if a messed up browser says it can't find its home page.

Ah, thanks! So it was legit.

Tho' they did seem to give him some dodgy advice re: mail clients for Win7.

Tho' they did seem to give him some dodgy advice re: mail clients for Win7.

Is there any good advice on that ?

In reply to a post by yarwell:

Tho' they did seem to give him some dodgy advice re: mail clients for Win7.

Is there any good advice on that ?

Anything except an MS email client?

Yes, so called "BT Tech Experts"
And they expect you to pay
For example, BT never managed to get their DNS working, not from Openwound days when I was last with them, to today now I'm b-a-c-k. If you need advice, Google is free and a lot more accurate than BT.

I've already reported them to LLC and got satisfaction. I'll leave it at that.

In reply to a post by BatBoy:

http://bt.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/7027/...

You have to be subscribed to that before you can get assistance:

"Once you've subscribed we then give you a freephone number which you can call if you need any further help."

I've had several of my customers call BT broadband support with a minor issue to only be called later in the day or the next day by "Microsoft" calling to help them with a problem.

It's either incredibly badly timed scam calls.. or someone at BT is leaking information.
There have also now been two occurrences of people who have moved into a house, had a line installed with a brand new number and not even used it and within a week had calls from "Microsoft" or their "Internet provider" about "problems" - Both customers reported to me that the scam caller has greeted them using their name.

I now keep a very close eye on those who have been scam called, how many were greeted with their names by the scam caller. Luckily the calls seem to have ceased in the last few months but at some level I think these "problem with your computer" scam callers are not entirely dialing randomly!

Tom - www.mouselike.org

Funny thing about phone numbers is their normally not new just recycled. Also there are no special numbers that can't be dialed randomly from any normal phone number pad.