Saved by suspicion

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This article was published 25/03/2023 (1273 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

According to various estimates there are close to 20,000 identity thefts in Canada every year.

Bev Dunlop is not aware of the statistics but knows it “happens all the time.”

But that didn’t make her experience this week any easier to take.

A self-professed “non-techy” — she does not even own a computer at home — the Oakbank resident has had her iPhone 7 for many years and has been an MTS/Bell MTS customer for more than 40 years.

One evening this week she got a call from a manager at a Bell retail store in Edmonton saying there was someone who appeared to be an authorized user of her account who wanted to buy a new phone on her account.

That kicked off three days and more than 13 hours worth of calls from Dunlop to Bell customer support and fraud prevention.

While the additional charges have been deleted from her account, Dunlop is rattled and angry at the unsympathetic response she’s received from Bell.

She believes were it not for the suspicions of the store clerks in Edmonton, things might have gone a lot differently.

“I was four minutes away from being charged $2,500 for an iPhone 14,” she said.

After resisting encouragement from family and friends to cancel her Bell account and sign up for mobile service with another provider, she finally succumbed.

“I think I might be spending a day lining up at the Rogers store,” she said.

After speaking to a total of 15 different people in her calls to customer support/fraud prevention Dunlop said she was very frustrated to have to repeat her story every time, was given conflicting information about how to proceed and was told by some support staff that something was taken care of only to be told by another that it had not been.

“Maybe I’m in la-la land, but I would be so much less upset if I had received a call from someone from Bell saying ‘Don’t worry Bev, we have this under control,’” she said.

The fraudster had somehow hacked her account and had himself included on Dunlop’s personal profile on her Bell Mobility account. The Edmonton store manager told Dunlop that the man showed up at the Edmonton store saying Dunlop was his mother-in-law who was in the hospital and that they would have to be spending a lot of time on the phone and that’s why he was an authorized user of the Manitoba account even though he was in Edmonton.

When the store manager became a little suspicious and started asking some questions the individual bolted out the door.

The same thing happened twice more at different stores the same day.

Dunlop is doubly upset because amid all the turmoil surrounding her account, she was repeatedly told the company would be unable to reinstate her with the same plan she had previously been on.

“After all that they were trying to tell me I would have to be on a plan that was about $15 per month more than I had been paying,” she said.

Eventually she was told it would remain in place but was also warned that her bills would likely be “wonky” for the next few months.

When asked for a response or explanation about what Dunlop had gone through, a Bell official responded via email saying, “We have been in touch with the customer to discuss the hardware upgrade that was processed. An investigation is being conducted and we will keep the customer informed as it proceeds.”

The Bell official said, “If a customer notices a suspicious transaction on their Bell Mobility account, they should immediately reach out to our loss prevention team at 1-800-509-9904. We have a team of dedicated experts there that will be able to assist.”

Dunlop’s situation is probably experienced by many people in Canada every day. The Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, a Canadian government agency, received 91,1990 reports of fraud last year that reaped $531 million in losses to Canadians.

Marc Perreault, the Winnipeg-based senior manager of security assurance and risk for San Francisco-based Mozilla Corp., said that for an individual to install themselves into the personal profile of mobile device account, they would need to have a lot of personal information of the actual owner of the account.

“Usually the company, Bell in this case, would ask for all sorts of information to verify you are the correct owner of the account… and then to add someone they would require a ton of information,” he said. “I think for someone to have gotten to be an authorized user on the account they would have had to have a significant amount of information on that person.”

While she’s already had a stressful week, Dunlop will not have to worry about changing her online habits too much. She is already among the few Canadians who does not purchase anything online.

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca