How not to inspire confidence

January 28, 2005

Recently, AT&T Wireless (which I liked, wonder of wonders) was bought out by Cingular. Since then, they’ve been pestering me to move my service from the old company’s books to Cingular’s books, so I just did that. I had to add a line for Elf anyway. And I decided to get a couple of new phones in the meantime.

Actually, I put this off for a month because the phone I wanted to buy was marked for a mail-in rebate, but the mail-in rebate form they linked to was about a month past expiration, and I didn’t know if I would get my money back or not. That alone should have been a warning. But then:

# At near to the last step of the purchasing process, the purchasing form had javascript that failed in Firefox and I had to restart my purchase using MSIE.
# In MSIE, after clicking the “do not click me twice” button for purchasing in MSIE, the operation “timed out” before I received a confirmation screen.
# The online order history, unlike most large companies, did not update immediately so I could not confirm that the purchase had gone through.
# Some time later I received a confirmation email missing one of the services I thought I had ordered.
# A little while later I received not one but two identical additional “Welcome Kit” emails. They both said: “To track the stat us of your order, go to . ” Notice the lack of a url. That url is also not in the original. Note also the space in “stat us”. That _is_ in the original.
# Said “Welcome Kits” also contained links to a PDF file which, when clicked, returned a “404 File Not Found” error.
# I then received a Wireless Order Status Update, in poorly formatted and invalid HTML, thanking me for my order and telling me what hardware I had ordered. It offered a link to track my package, which _also_ returned a “404 File Not Found” error.
# Every single message told me not to reply to that email message with questions but to instead call customer service. Which is why I am posting this here *before* complaining to them directly — because they have no email customer service. They also have no mailing address, or any apparent way to report web site difficulties to a technical staff.

It _says_ “Cingular.com” in the URL, but this has all the hallmarks of a phishing scam.

After all this, I will not be surprised if my package arrives filled with dead gerbils instead of my cell phones.

Posted in Commerce