SRF consumer protection show "Cash collapse" released a reportage about a Salt store in Bern that apparently is scamming customers routinely (German):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDocbvf4lnk
The shameless store clerks send retirees home with up to five unwanted mobile phone contracts by making them sign some papers and claiming that those signatures are needeed to get simple questions answered in the shop.
As somebody with 15+ years of experience in IT service I’d like to point out that this unfortunately isn’t a problem limited to that specific Salt store in Bern or even to Salt as a provider.
We have seen and heard similar stories from our residential customers over and over. Most of them were scammed in the Swisscom shop (which doesn’t mean that the Swisscom shop is worse than Salt’s or Sunrise’s shops, it’s simply that the majority of our customers are also Swisscom customers). Although I must say, five contracts at once is probably the worst I’ve ever heard.
A typical sequence that we hear often is this:
– Customer goes to the shop because of a simple problem with their phone (usually stuff that would be fixed by simply rebooting the phone)
– Shop says that the phone is broken beyond repair and recommends to renew the contract for another 2 years and buy a new phone
In the cases where the affected customers didn’t fall for it and instead showed us the phone for a 2nd opinion it was always an extremely easy fix done in under 2 minutes which tells me that those shops don’t even try to help the customer but are always declaring everything broken in order to sell a new one.
Kassensturz: Salt Shop scamming customers (as usual for shops of Telco providers)
byu/b00nish inSwitzerland
Posted by b00nish
5 Comments
Well, – as unethical and shady this is – that’s just the first part of the story. The second is, that the daughter of the Salt-HardSell-Scam-victim tried for several months to cancel the whole Sh*tshow and spent countless hours on the phone, mail, e-mail etc… with no result.
Only when the Ombudsperson came in, Salt reduced the number of mobile phone contracts from 5 -> 1 and only with SRF Kassensturz, Salt finally cancelled all. And the joke: After finally doing something, they just put the whole error / blame on the person in the Salt shop…
Which left me with even bigger questions about their defer – dispute – deny customer service strategy at HQ…
And this is why I handle all the IT support for my parents (80+). Yes, it’s annoying sometimes but I don’t want them to get scammed.
Idk if it’s the same Salt shop but my mom had trouble when returning her Salt router when she moved to a new home that doesn’t have any Salt access. When she tried to return the router in the store they didn’t want to give her a written confirmation that they received it, and afterwards Salt gave her a bill for not returning the router even though she did. She had to complain to multiple people until they finally withdrew the bill. That’s just not ok.
Remember this when thinking about the Halbierungsinitiative!
nice try, salt.