In a Reddit post, verified by the subreddit mod team, user u/telecommthrowaway29 claims AT&T customers may have been defrauded. The alleged defrauding involved customers being signed up for DirecTV NOW without their knowledge. According to the poster, this happened mid-2017 while DirecTV NOW was struggling to gain traction. During that time, AT&T supplied a coupon code for the first month at $10USD. This is where the poster claims management began having sales reps sign customers up for the service without their knowledge or consent.
UPDATED (6/23/2018 04:50 p.m. ET): AT&T reached out to us with this official statement.
Last fall, we detected some simultaneous customer orders and cancellations of a free product trial. We determined some employees had violated our policies and based on our findings we took appropriate action. We reversed any unauthorized activity in the very few cases where customers incurred charges.
We will update again with any developments.
ORIGINAL STORY CONT:
In November of 2016, AT&T unveiled a streaming TV service called DirecTV NOW. Fast forward to the end of summer/early fall of 2017. The product was not doing well and AT&T gives their reps a coupon code to apply to give the customer the first month of service for $10. The way that the subscription flow in AT&Ts system worked, reps could sign customers up for up to three DirecTV NOW accounts per card.
After learning this, managers would have reps discount down products to offset the price of DirecTV Now and have the rep sign up the customer without their knowledge. The rep was then expected to keep the login information and cancel the subscription before the second service month commenced. If the reps refused, they would be threatened with discipline for not matching expected numbers and some were threatened with termination.
In December, an email was sent out to reps stating that the company was aware of what was going on and that they would not tolerate it anymore. It is now that I would like to remind you that the behavior was taught to reps by management and that the reps were coerced into this practice. After receiving that email, All reps, to my knowledge, abandoned the practice due to fear of being fired.
We all thought it was over until investigators started dropping by stores in January. In March, reps who were slated to go on a trip to Florida for having stellar numbers the year before were terminated. Shortly after that, reps were told by union reps as well as AT&T management that the investigations had seemed to be over. However, as soon as the Time Warner deal went through, reps across the board were fired. The only management fired were reps when the investigation started. Hundreds of employees have Either already been fired or are slated to be fired within the coming days.
Those who were not fired were given final written warnings. Given the severity of firings, you would think AT&T would have notified customers of this, but you would be wrong. ATT DID NOT NOTIFY CUSTOMERS THAT FRAUD MAY HAVE TAKEN PLACE ON THEIR ACCOUNT THIS COULD EFFECT THOUSANDS OF CUSTOMERS
We have reached out to AT&T for comment on this story and will update should we hear back from them. In the meantime. If you’re an AT&T customer who had this happen to you, we’d like to hear from you. If you’re a former or current sales rep that can verify this, we’d also like to hear from you at contact@techaeris.com.
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