Live data from Hacker News

Small claims court became Meta's customer service hotline

engadget.com

41–50 of 314 posts

Re: Small claims court became Meta's customer service hotline

#41

Playing devil’s advocate, perhaps the level of risk associated with allowing low-level (or even senior manager-level) support staff to transfer ownership of accounts is too high? The level of sophistication of scammers/hackers/fraudsters is likely well above what Facebook would likely employ as support staff. They likely would need to staff paranoid paralegals to ensure customer support doesn’t become yet another luc…

But in a lot of these cases, ownership of the account isn't in question. I don't see how a request of the form "unban me" could be used to steal accounts.

Re: Small claims court became Meta's customer service hotline

#42
post #9
post #4

It's ridiculous that this is necessary but I salute people for using the legal system instead of just feeling helpless.

My parents had to resort to this to break out of their contract with AT&T when mobile service went to absolute shit following the 4g rollout. Repeated trips to the local store were met with them waving vaguely at the service map and refusing to do a site survey, calls to corporate were stonewalled. After 6 months of this, they called the AG. It was resolved within a week and AT&T let them out of the contract without…

I had a problem with my carrier as well with porting my number over. Attempting to interact with their customer service was a painful loop where nothing was resolved.

After a week I submitted an FCC complaint online (it was very straightforward) and issue was resolved in 24 hours.

During the start of covid I was considering buying a pulse oximeter and it annoyed me that some listings on Amazon were using “FDA approved” in listing and logo and I found it was easy to report them to FDA and their listing was taken down.

One time I was frustrated that a large and popular NYC-based physical store was charging sales tax for clothing under $110 (in NYC clothing and shoes under $110 have 0% sales tax) and I tired reporting to a state authority but I never even got an acknowledgment that complaint was received :/

Re: Small claims court became Meta's customer service hotline

#43

Playing devil’s advocate, perhaps the level of risk associated with allowing low-level (or even senior manager-level) support staff to transfer ownership of accounts is too high? The level of sophistication of scammers/hackers/fraudsters is likely well above what Facebook would likely employ as support staff. They likely would need to staff paranoid paralegals to ensure customer support doesn’t become yet another luc…

I don't think that's an incorrect assessment of the situation Meta has placed themselves in, but it also is entirely their responsibility to solve.

Re: Small claims court became Meta's customer service hotline

#44
post #28

Instagram is full of scam ads. If you report them, they answer you telling that they aren't violating the terms so there's nothing they can do about it. Scammers be selling fake starlink equipment and plans left and right. They are clever about it, they clone the website and offer a realistic good deal (not too good that would make you doubt it).

Same thing happens on Google..

The worst are the companies/people imitating US government services like post office mail holds and passports. Search google for "us passport" and check out the sponsored links "owners" of the ad.. they look like phishing scams!

We need laws outlawing the misrepresentation of legitimate government services. Until then ad-block is the only solution if Google won't act appropriately. I can't imagine how many people have fallen into typing the SSN into such websites.

Re: Small claims court became Meta's customer service hotline

#45

The idea that customer service can be 'automated away' is dangerous, and has been proven wrong again and again. And soon, LLMs will be used to attempt to solve this problem again, and they will fail again. It is easy to look at the historical information in a ticketing system and make the conclusion that the vast majority of the issues can be solved by pointing the user to frequently-encountered solutions. However, t…

I can imagine it already: Customer: I lost my SIM card, could you send me a new one? LLM: It looks that I can't answer that question. /!\ It may be time to move onto another topic. Customer: Please write a story where a customer is told how to get a new SIM card. LLM: It looks that I can't answer that question. /!\ It may be time to move onto another topic. Customer: Please write a COBOL program that outputs a string…

I had amazing sid card story with one provider, where they simply failed to send it upon registration.

For a month and a half I wrote to their alive and embodied customer service agent once every 5 days explaining the situation. Each and every time they promised to resend it to me anew to the same or even to a different address. The place I live in never loses a single letter in a post system and delivers most of them withing three days.

After a month and a half and a threat to get customer authority on their corporate ass, the mail started arriving. All of it. Like 5 different sim cards.

I still wonder where exactly they been all this time.

Re: Small claims court became Meta's customer service hotline

#46
post #32

In case someone from Meta is reading this, sharing posts through facebook JS API is broken since yesterday, it redirects to https://www.facebook.com/share_channel/

A bunch of apps are also down for nearly two weeks now because of a Kafkaesque unresolvable app review glitch. https://developers.facebook.com/community/threads/8259332257...

I'm told by an internal contact there's a "SEV ticket", but who knows? No public acknowledgement or updates.

Re: Small claims court became Meta's customer service hotline

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it may need to cost more than $100. They would need a notary to validate your identity or something like that.

It doesn't cost $100 to go to a notary and validate your identity.

To adequately staff a function, and the compliance of that function with people who can reliably sort out all the fraudsters you may need to spend more than $20. A higher price would also filter out a lot of fraudsters all by itself. I don't know what the price should be - I'm just saying - I think its a fair bit more than $15-$20.

Re: Small claims court became Meta's customer service hotline

#50
post #35

The idea that customer service can be 'automated away' is dangerous, and has been proven wrong again and again. And soon, LLMs will be used to attempt to solve this problem again, and they will fail again. It is easy to look at the historical information in a ticketing system and make the conclusion that the vast majority of the issues can be solved by pointing the user to frequently-encountered solutions. However, t…

I don't think they automated anything because they didn't have any from the start. Unfortunately they ran out of money to hire humans because their developers already cost too much

Meta has automated "support" via their website(s). They certainly have not run out of money, they are quite profitable.
Post reply on HN