Blockbuster Supports Fraud?

Without going into all the gory details, I seem to have been the victim of a (so far) minor bit of identity theft over the weekend.

Somebody signed me up for various services, or even made some purchases billed to one of my credit cards. In some cases, it was rather painless to cancel these transactions - the "confirmation" emails I received included toll-free contact numbers, and calling those numbers got me through to somebody quickly, who then would listen to my tail of woe and resolve the issue.

And then we have Blockbuster Online. No contact number in the email. No contact number on the website. No easy way to contact them at all. So I hit "reply" on the email welcoming me to their service and said "this was set up with stolen information, the credit card has been cancelled, so please cancel this registration."

Their response was priceless -- "Sorry you have to deal with this, but we are not authorized to cancel this account due to this claim of fraudulent activity or identity theft." (italics, mine).

Thus, my recently sent message to Blockbuster Investor Relations:

You know what's interesting? That a large company like Blockbuster will accept a fraudulently generated account for Blockbuster Online, but when the defrauded consumer attempts to get this resolved, he is told "we are not authorized to cancel this account due to this claim of fraudulent activity or identity theft."

I'm sure my local media outlets and the whole rest of the internet will be interested to know that Blockbuster worries more about inflating its "subscriber" numbers than resolving issues with fraud.

I had no problem at all contacting some of the seemingly sketchy companies that also were involved in this incident, and having them quickly and easily cancel the orders and verify that no attempt would be made to charge my credit card. They even published toll-free numbers so that I could contact them.

I'll never be a blockbuster customer, and I will make sure EVERYBODY knows how you all operate.

So there you go. If you're reading this, you are part of "the whole rest of the internet" and/or "EVERYBODY."

Please think twice about patronizing a company that seems to value "the numbers" more than security.

xposted to Bent! Blog