Have you ever worked as a front-line support agent? I'm guessing not. I have many years ago, and for an ISP too. If I bought an Amazon share back then for every time a customer called support because they were "hacked", I'd not be posting here during a boring meeting because I'd own my own private island.
The two best conversations I can recall were when we changed a customer's email address about a half dozen times over a year because "hackers were getting in and sending them emails" (internal customer note: stop signing up for porn sites), and a customer's computer could barely browse the web because they were running about 5 software firewalls because they were "under surveillance by the NSA" (internal customer note: schizophrenia).
The expected value of processing requests like this any way other than patting the reporter on their head and assuring them the company will research it, then sending them along their way with a new device while chucking the old one in the "reflash" pile isn't just zero, it's sharply negative.
The author's mistake was not posting somewhere like NANOG or Full-Disclosure with a detailed write-up. The right circles would've seen it, the detailed write-up would've revealed that the author wasn't an idiot or paranoid, and the popped device might've been researched.