Consumer rights have taken such a beating in the internet age. If you look at pre-internet product categories there are all kind of protections on the books like minimum warranty lengths, lemon laws, etc. Meanwhile, with software products - even very expensive ones - you're at the mercy of the vendor and their ToS. The fact that you can't even get refunds (e.g. within 15 days or something) for most software is ridicu…
i’m pretty partial to the idea that this is not somewhere government needs to be involved
But if you offer a service where you pay $20 to get your account back, well, nobody's going to want to pay that unless it actually works, so their incentive is to make it work. Which makes it start to feel more like a "pay $20 to get somebody's account, if you lie well" service
I think it may need to cost more than $100. They would need a notary to validate your identity or something like that.
Anyone can make a fake notary stamp. Or become a notary themselves. This is super common in fraud cases. Notaries are basically a worthless anachronism and shouldn't be relied upon for anything important.
And even if identity is validated, what does that mean? Like there are probably a thousand Meta accounts for "Robert Jones". If someone has a valid government issued ID in that name should he then be able to "recover" any account with the same (or similar) name?
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 ca…
Have you reported these and the fact that this is a reoccurring issue to the FTC? Most of these agencies need consumers to initiate action.
Every time you see these scam 'ads' or sponsored listings, report them. Every time you get something unsafe from Amazon (for example I submitted the semi-recent Youtuber investigating fuses that are unsafe) report it to the FTC. The agencies that stop this initiate action from reports. Which means you have to report these things.
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 the…
They stopped paying their outsourced SIM Card burning and shipping vendor. This isn’t a state in their support database, which dutifully queued up requests as-if everything is fine. Eventually they paid their vendor and the requests got popped off the queue.
Consumer rights have taken such a beating in the internet age. If you look at pre-internet product categories there are all kind of protections on the books like minimum warranty lengths, lemon laws, etc. Meanwhile, with software products - even very expensive ones - you're at the mercy of the vendor and their ToS. The fact that you can't even get refunds (e.g. within 15 days or something) for most software is ridicu…
i’m pretty partial to the idea that this is not somewhere government needs to be involved
On the contrary, ensuring fair trading practices is precisely the area where government needs to be most actively involved in economic matters. What is the downside of clamping down on borderline fraud, exactly?
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…
How has this been proven wrong? Meta is enormously profitable despite this tiny number of small claims lawsuits. If anything they have proven that customer service is a waste of money.
I never said they weren't profitable. I said they haven't fixed the problem with automation. They halfway fixed the problem, and ignored the hard part.
It's ridiculous that this is necessary but I salute people for using the legal system instead of just feeling helpless.
Just to actually say what is probably obvious.. this means that corporations have found a way to outsource the costs of providing customer support to the tax paying general public, including those who are not even using their services and never heard of the company. Ag’s should not be requesting that this is fixed, but requiring it in no uncertain terms, and giving out massive penalties for every single time it’s all…
The small claims system is arguably the right place for such stuff (malfeasance by businesses towards customers) by design, but whether it is properly funded for that is another matter. I do think it would make some sense to levy some kind of tax in proportion to customer count (however determined) on businesses that would be used solely to fund the system.
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…
We're still at the stage of "old school" (pre-ChatGPT) bots, just with higher-quality audio. The other day my wife got a call from someone who sounded like real woman, but reacted just a tad too quickly; I tried a bunch of usual hack to get at the system prompt on her, but the only thing I learned is that it's a keyword-listening bot with a lot of high-quality audio recordings, including plenty of deflecting and reassuring that it is a real human, despite very much not being one.
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…
Hahaha, customer service reps can be social engineered just like LLMs