95
US man returns from Europe to $143,000 T-Mobile bill for using phone overseas
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2024
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Weird News - Things that make you go 'hmmm'
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A relative of mine worked on the anti-fraud team at a major UK bank. He'd been there a while and was pretty handy at his job, so he got allocated to the private banking arm - where high net worth customers got their gucci cards with ridiculous perks, so long as they credited their account with (or invested) £100k per year or whatever.
Most people were generally appreciative when the algorithm pinged the odd transaction that was out of the ordinary, and were thankful when he called them to check that the transactions were genuine or not.
Two groups of people stood out to him:
-Footballers: nice enough folk, but almost inevitably opened with "hold on, I'll put my mum on" when dealing with finances;
-People with more money than sense: a specific anecdone jumped out, namely one where their card had been used to buy two first class return tickets from South Africa to London with British Airways, totalling something daft like close to £10k. He calls the customer up, explains the reason, and the customer's all "...why are you bothering me about a sum of money like that?"
I absolutely do believe that people either have so much money that huge bill spikes just get lost in the noise - that, or just use a company device for a large business or government dept and hope the overall bill jump isn't big enough to notice.
Absolutely wild.
Gotta respect the footballers for that. They recognize they may not be smart enough to figure it out and put someone on that they can trust. Who can anyone trust if not their mama. I feel bad for people who have terrible parents. I haven't always seen eye to eye with my mom and our relationship is still a smidge strained but I know she cares for me and would break the earth for me. As she always says, it's not her house it's our house.
A lot of these guys have been in the circuit since they were kids so the parents have been behind the career the whole time.