News Sky sting unmasks repair shop frauds

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/2009/07/23/sky-sting-unmasks-repair-shop-frauds/1

A sting operation carried out by Sky News showed five out of six computer repair shops overcharging for a simple fault - and attempting to access the customer's bank account.

 

As I commented on earlier, why are people shocked at this?

Getting your local bit-tech forum member to take a look is a better idea. And payment in caffeine and cheesecake is cheaper then what those places charge.

 

What, PCworld is overcharging and mis-diagnosing? I'm shocked! PcWorld Chester regularly outsource their fixing to my mate's firm, and charge the customer for it, because they haven't got a clue what they're doing. Steer clear!

 

we where offered to take the network installs from our local pc world a while ago, they wanted to pay our guys £15 per hour and charge the customer £75 per hour, when I mentioned all our vehicles have our company name all over them in vinyls they said we would have to buy new vehicles.

so 15 quid per hour, have to buy a couple of vehicles just for them, they do nothing and earn lots more than us who do the work, no thanks!

this report is bad though, your average joe wouldnt know the difference between a good and a bad place, as it is hard to distinguish.

one way would be steer clear of the cheap as chips places, I guess its not a guarantee as the dodgy ones could just hike their prices but you do usually get what you pay for.

 

It's not surprising that they are overcharging, and everyone does this - taking advantage of their technical knowledge against people who don't have any - see plumbers and mechanics for example right?

But the attempted access of personal details is frankly criminal and personally I think TS should pursue this with a view to prosecuting those who do it. Copying the pictures of their researcher in her bikini is f***ed up to be honest, that guy at least should be out of a job by now

 

Seems to me there's a problem with breaches of trust.

As an analogy - if you had your car at a garage for repairs and you'd left a private photo album in the unlocked glove box, would you expect the mechanic to look at your photos?

Although it isnt what you'd like to assume about people, if there's no safeguards on private information it'll probably get seen. As I've seen with friends and family, some people are willing to store many personal things on their computer with little or no knowledge of security.

 

i think what we need to keep in mind is that the PC tech snooping on people's photos isnt necessarily a bad thing in some cases- Gary Glitter was only caught out after taking his PC in for repair at a local PC World.

 

if you watched the tv report on sky news web site when 2-3 places disabled the laptop one even went as far as to use an Solder ion the ram it self

 

Is it actaully illegal to copy a person's photos, regardless of what state of dress a person in the picture may be?

It may not be the most moral thing to do, but in this scenario, is it actually breaking a law? I suppose it depends on whatever terms and conditions the repair shop has in place (which I doubt anybody would read).

 

That's a good point, they may use some excuse along the lines of "safe-gaurding your data if anything goes wrong."

Regardless, this is absolutely ridiculous but not a bit surprising. I'm so glad my school has finally got the savvy to teach kids some really basic hardware based tech stuff early on. Its going to save them so much hassle in later life.

 

Maybe it's symptomatic of a bigger problem that people often put their trust in things which they know little about. On one hand, a computer is a tool, on the other, a complex piece of machinery which has many physical and non-physical parts that can go wrong.

In my opinion, the ubiquity of computers (and devices such as mobile phones and PDAs) in people's every-day life coupled with the 'I dont want to know how it works, I just want it to work' mentality allows these kind of things to occur in the first place.

 

bloody hell thats how much they charge

my mates rates are £20 an hour + scans prices on hardware, and that does not include waiting around for an install to finish and if i cant fix it i won't charge them

 

+1 rep just for using symptomatic and ubiquity in the same post. Proof that the english lanuage exists beyond 3 syllable words and acronyms in the Internets. Especially in forums.

 

lol that doesn't surprise me about PC World at all but Revival computers was really quite shocking, going as far as to try and log in to someones bank account! Although yes people deserve to get their bank account robbed by STORING PASSWORDS ON YOUR COMPUTER! But I didn't think a repair guy would do that =\

 

My rates are exactly the same, although for payment I have also accepted biscuits, cake, booze... and copies of their "private" folder

I'm utterly unsurprised by the findings, to be honest. I've never had a good experience with one of these companies. I would like to set up my own just so there's one decent one around, but 1) I don't have any transport and 2) from what I've seen, independent ones always go under and get taken over by PC World and the like.

Solution: Turn to your geek friends! But offer them payment. I have a whole subset of my friends who only ever contact me for PC help, and don't offer any compensation, which I find extremely rude.

 

I'm not shocked. We had people overcharging the CS department of my uni for services. And they REALLY should know better!

 

The only solution to the private details security concern is to remove the HDD before sending PC to be repaired. Of course that doesn't help if its the HDD causing the faults, and the extra time it would take to setup an HDD with the correct drivers to enable the testing would be costly to the customer.

Would I trust anyone with any of my HDDs whether they contain private info or not?

Or to put it another way, would I give any of you on here the keys to my house?

Yeah riiiiight!

 

That would be different, if photo's were there in plain view then it is reasonable that they are to be viewed...

As would it be if a technician was required to transfer say "My Pictures" to a new HDD for a customer then it is reasonable to assume that photos would be viewed.

However for the purpose of a Ram test, what would be the need to search through files?

With regards to the comment of Kamikaze, Yes that is a case where it proved beneficial (Albeit not for GG!), but again it goes to the reason why the files were being viewed.

 

Agreed Abhorsen. There would be no need to do it, and you'd hope there'd be some processes in place to deter things like that.

Also, my point was that the photos were in an unlocked glove box, not in plain view. You'd have to be actively looking for things to see them in there, but perhaps you'd do that in the normal course of your work on the car, and you wouldn't have to unlock (i.e. circumvent the security) to see them. Not that that means you can look at them, just that it could be reasonably assumed you'd come across them in the normal course of your work.

 

The one shining light from this story was the "ONE" tech chap who actually called them back straight away to say the memory was just loose and to come and pick it up free of charge. You guys in the London area should find out who he was and get his name in lights.