Meriem’s red roses
Whilst a little retiring compared to the other girls in the customer service team, Meriem is good on the phones and always makes it known when she is on to a good call (she sits behind me). Recently, in her own unique way (jumping up and down and waving as if to guide a Boeing 747 in to land) she indicated that she’d hooked a good’un.
She casually said “oh, the one hundred red roses bouquet, yes, we can deliver that for you today” in the manner of someone who routinely arranges for one hundred grand-prix roses to be arranged into the largest bouquet we make.
To put this into perspective, the bouquet is half the size of her and literally weighs a ton! Don’t believe me – take a look: 100 red roses.
The call continued and the other girls began to take interest as Meriem expertly coached the young man on the phone through the process. Having established the details of the recipient she then proceeded to take the card details. The first card attempt failed and so the young man put his friend on the phone who was apparently happy to foot the bill for him. By this point my suspicions were raised and I expected the second card attempt to also fail. 100 red roses don’t walk out of our door without the appropriate fraud-checking scrutiny from Will. However, the card details did go through…
Stunned, we wrote to our Irish friend, Barry, over at PayPal who is kind enough to double check that big payments look OK. He checked the account in question and came back with - there is no history of fraudulent activity on this card – which was music to Meriem’s ears (more jumping).
The flowers were made and I was enlisted to take this picture of the flowers just before they were delivered.
An “unauthorised use of card” charge back was issued a month later…
Filed under: Flowers, Fraud, General on May 25th, 2007
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So does that fall more under scam than fraud?
Do you not have some recourse as you know who ordered the flowers, who the friend was and who the flowers went to?
In many ways you are right. This should actually fall under the “why the banking system is rubbish” category.
I would dearly love to wax lyrical about how this particular transaction was authorised by the bank however, in doing so I would be leaking one of banking’s (previously) best kept secrets. This would also subject us to other similar attempts.
Know this, the guy who owned the card saw a large amount of money on his statement and of course rang up his bank, they then did a chargeback which not only took the money back from us but also charged us and PayPal a handing fee.
So we are out of pocket twice and get charged a handling fee. This is why there are fewer branches - less of an incentive for us to go round there and give them a good shoeing!
Oh and no recourse at all - your mum could use your card and you could do a chargeback.
Email me and I will explain why no one is safe!