Administrator at the office got a call on the phone today from someone claiming to be from Hewlett Packard and "needed to talk about the problem with the HP printer" The administrator sent me the call and when I picked up, the person on the line said "I'm calling for Hewlett Packard, this is about your HP2015 printer, we're sorry we were supposed to call about the price change on the toner it is going up to 748 dollars from its regular price of 698 dollars, we didn't get this information to you out in time." I'm thinking hmmm I don't even have a HP2015 printer and anyway, this is a lot of money for toner so I said "how much toner?", she said "a box" I am thinking this must be a carton of about 6 or something, I said "one box?" and she said "yes, now we will complete the order and ship it out at the lower cost" I said "what company are you?" and she said "IDC Servco", then I said "how come I have never heard of you and why are you quoting prices to me as if you were shipping it out?", the next thing she did was hang up.
I checked on the internet and found this is a common scam attempt from this company:
http://www.complaints.com/2007/september/14/IDCSERVCO_152345.htm That is a post from 2007 so this stuff has been happening for a long time.
Please tell your people in charge of the printing supplies to watch out for this, they are fast talkers....
This company tried the same scam on our company a person who called herself Simona called and said she was from IKON and that we would be needing toner soon for our color copier and she ask for my name which I gave her thinking she was from Ikon she faxed an authorzation form to us at a cost of $619.00 for one toner it was for a black copier. The person who does our ordering was off that day, so I was going to show it to her when she returned to work, about 20 mintues later this Simona called back and said she was waiting for the faxed authorization I said to her I was not authorized to order any supplies and she said she was told I was. I told her I was not signing anything and hung up. I showed the fax to the person who orders for our company she told me she was not familiar with IDCSERVCO or the person who called she also mentioned that someone had called for me earlier a red flag really went off, about a hour later this Simona calls back I was furious that she had the nerve to call me back so I told she lied about being a rep for Ikon and was using Deceptive Sales practices. I then googled this company and almost passed out when I saw the hundreds of complaints against then. I filed a complaint with BBB. I hope these people end up behind bars where belong!
ReplyDeleteThese people are really slick. We have one authorized point of ordering for our agency. As it happens we have a lone new staff member at an offsite location who was duped into believing that these people work with us. Some how they had her name, phone number, etc. Of course by the time, we found out about it she'd just opened the cartridge and has been using it. $563 for one cartridge. Their shipping fee of $65 is just under the cost that we would normally pay for a cartridge. As if that is not enough, and although we can't immediately see this reflected in the documents that were erroneously signed, the employee advised that by signing this document that they were able to be 'locked' into this 'reduced rate' for the next 7-8 cartridges. We're going to check with our legal counsel before we try to fight this unauthorized and totally ridiculous mess. I truly hope we can fight this. Hopefully by adding our experience to the list - other individuals and companies can avoid this mess altogether.
ReplyDelete9/5/09 Update: I don't know what our attorney's conversation with them was, but they have agreed that we will send them an unused cartridge which they'll pay to have picked up ... and then we"ll be clear. Whew!
ReplyDeleteFantastic - that would be great if you could find out what was said and share it here for others to go that route.
ReplyDelete1) u can tell them to put your company on a "do not-call list" but that makes noooooo sence if, well, for one they print out adresses online and just throw away the bads. and
ReplyDelete2) do u people even realize how MANY toner telemarketing firms there are across the world? You SWEAR ur gonna be on a do not call list, legal or not. There Are SOOOOO MANY so, sorry but in our dreams thats gonna happen.
also, the bbb isnt gonna do zip with ur measly complaints. helooooo, years of this is going on and to this day its happening. sorry but tough luck. run ur company smart enough to not let it happen u dopes
Sigh. These motherf**kers got me about a month ago, I should have trusted my gut instinct because right away i thought it was strange that i was being called about toner but they truly made me believe they worked for Konica Minolta and sign for the cartridge at the "discounted price before it was being raised"... They then billed us a ridiculous invoice of $508 and something cents! They called back this morning again saying they were going to ship out another 2 cartridges at the price of over $900 and wanted me to sign off on it! I asked them if I could call them back (because when i heard that i knew it was BS), and they asked if they could call me back instead (give away..) I hung up and started contacting our REAL Konica rep, and just 5 minutes into the e-mail they were calling back again! I wasn't so nice this time, and instead of faxing back their stupid order form I sent them a letter telling them they were fake//misrepresenting//scammers//ect and let them know i was shipping the toner they sent us back to them at the address of their "warehouse" and to never contact us again and that if they shipped us anything (like the 2 other cartiridges she said we would be charged for whether we accepted them or not WTF???) they would be refused and not paid! - I feel like a huge dummy too, this is my first reception job and didn't know toner pirates existed! There is icing on the cake to my story though... we traced the cheque we sent them from their original invoice and they hadn't cashed it yet so we were able to cancel it - muahahahaha.
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