Pranksters Insult Comcast Customers

How much worse could Comcast’s customer service woes get?

How about this bad: Pranksters are now calling up the company’s customers — pretending to be Comcast employees — and then insulting those customers with curse words and worse.

Boarding Area’s Christopher Elliot has the story of Ryon Nishimori, who was contacted by a faux Comcast rep after complaining about his bill to the @ComcastCares Twitter account.

“At first he was very nice and seemed to have the details of my account,” recalls Nishimori, who works for a record store in Nashville. “All of a sudden, somebody else hopped on the call, saying he was a supervisor.”

And here’s where things got a little strange.

“He immediately took over and asked if I’d like him to explain Comcast’s service fees. I said, ‘No thank you,’ but he did anyways. And his words were, ‘We are Comcast, and we can charge you whatever the f**k we want’,” he says.

Nishimori was shocked and he began recording the conversation. In it, multiple “representatives” used language so highly inappropriate and deeply offensive that I’m uncomfortable even alluding to it on this site.

The prank has happened to more than one unfortunate Comcast customer, Elliott says. “The hoaxers monitor the public @Comcastcares feed, looking for complaints. They run a search on a customer’s Twitter account. Often they turn up cell phone numbers, as they did in McMahan’s and Nishimori’s case. Then they call the number, pretending to be Comcast representatives. And you know the rest.”

Bizarrely, Elliott’s post ends with a poll asking if Comcast “deserves” the pranksters, but that doesn’t seem to be the right question, does it? Comcast is being victimized, but it’s the customers who are being treated poorly by the pranksters. The customers certainly don’t deserve that treatment.

The lesson, unfortunately? Be careful when posting your public info — particularly cell phone numbers — online. There’s no such thing as a “private conversation” on Twitter.