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3GScottishUser
12th August 2005, 02:32 PM
From Mobile Toady (12/08/2005):

A Southern dealer has been hit with a colossal £360,000 clawback for racking up alleged fraudulent connections on 3, according to sources close to the matter.

The dealer is alleged to have connected customers on deals with 3’s high-end Motorola A1000, but kept the handsets and sold them on to the overseas market. The allegations stretch to connecting customers with Sim-only contracts or packaging Sim cards with box-broken Motorola C975s, thought to have been bought from non-specialists such as Woolworths and Argos.

The Sims were ostensibly for connection with the Motorola A1000. He is believed to have connected around 800 customers through the scam over a four-to-five month period.

The dealer is also thought to be expecting a hefty cashback bill.
A source estimated that the dealer’s customers could be owed as much as £228,000 in cashbacks given the number of connections he was doing. ‘Now he has to pay the clawback and the cashback. One of those is going to bite,’ said the source.

3 declined to give specific details on the matter. A spokesman said: ‘There are terms and conditions under which our products are sold. Any dealer who is meeting those has nothing to worry about. We’ve said this all year. This is a challenge for every operator.’

The dealer is understood to have connected through a distributor, which is also trying to recover the money.

The 3 spokesman denied speculation that the operator is on the verge of launching a wide-ranging crackdown on dealers breaking the rules: ‘There’s nothing new in this for us, it is part of our ongoing work.’

http://www.mobiletoday.co.uk/artman-test/publish/article_627.shtml

Ben
12th August 2005, 03:14 PM
Wow, good on Three for putting an end to it.

I sincerely doubt all of the cashback customers will be able to get their redemption money. The chap will just file for bankruptcy and move on. Cashback really is the bane of everything mobile these days, it's a severely messed up system.