Customers Caught In Lies

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I just had something happen here at work where the customer just completely not only flat-out lied, but also brought in evidence against himself.
Background: I work for a loan company, we also cash checks and whatnot, work with MoneyGram, that sort of thing.
Now, if a customer is late in paying off their loan, we add a late fee, and then deposit their check to draw the money from their bank; that is, unless they call us ahead of time they can’t make it, then if they ask us to deposit it, we will without penalty (usually) since they were curteous enough to call.
We will even hold a check a day or two past the due date if they’re so nice to let us know they can’t make it for some reason, and unless they are a habitual offender, we won’t add the fee.
When they sign the ACH check and the contract, they have the information right there (except the parts about our leniency if we’re feeling nice that day, it’s something they become pleasantly surprised with and make them happy for the extra customer service). And when they sign up with us, we tell them all this information. They know these things. We even give them a copy of the contract with their information of the loan and everything to take home with them.

Enter idiot customer who we gave such leniency to.

Now, we had a note under his name in our database saying to hold his check over to March 28, and if he did not come in to pay it then, to deposit his check as per the statement above.
He walks in with the money needed to pay off his loan, and not only that, but with more than enough money.
However, he then goes all “duh” about the late fees, saying he never did call us or say any sort that he wanted us to hold it over. Now, we don’t just make notes at random about this, of course. We made the note because he told us about it, and I informed him that he did indeed tell us to hold it an extra day or two and we’d be lenient enough to say ‘okay’ and let him pay it off a bit late with no fee because he called us and let us know. He was told however, that if he did not come in on the 28th, fees would be charged.
But since he didn’t come in on the 28th by closing time, we added a late fee. It would probably have been deposited today if he didn’t come in.

So after losing the ‘why do I have late fees’ battle, he then tries the ‘well shouldn’t you have deposited my check’ battle, because he initialed on the line to have us deposit it if he didn’t come in by the due date. Well, we would have, if he didn’t call us to let us know to hold it over for him per his request.
And if he was so sure that we’d deposit it, why did he come in with money, and not only that, come in with more than enough to pay it off as if expecting the late fee?
If you’re going to lie, don’t do it to someone who has been told he would make a good lawyer, and can spot these problems. Plus the long pauses between your statements showing you were thinking of what to say next didn’t help you.
So after then telling us we’re not doing our business the way it should be, and saying basically we suck, he then asks how much the interest would be on a $510.00 loan for 2 weeks. :dubious: :rolleyes:
Good job chief, way to really stick it to us.

Well that was my current story. Anyone else have had customers who lied to you and more or less contradicted themselves, or have you perhaps been caught in your own? You can be honest. :smiley:
Or just give your ‘caught a customer in a lie’ story regardless, they’re fun to tell.

2

A few examples from this past week:

Guy comes into the office, alone, keys in hand, to sign a payment agreement to reinstate his drivers’ license. How’d you get down here? Ummm, bus? Sure.

Client calls, asks for a call back to a specific number. Call back, obviously a business as the person who answers the call (THE CLIENT)says it is. Talk to client who says s/he is not working right now. So, we know you’re a roofer by trade. You answer the phone “Blahblah’s Roofing and Remodeling”. But you’re not working.

Client calls, says he’s not the babydaddy, despite it being 5 years after genetic testing proved he was. My brother/cousin/best friend took the test. And appeared in court, which your order says you did? At the hearing where you said you were the father after the court provided you with the test results?

We currently do this phone rotation crud, so when a client calls she or he will get one of seven child support officers - we work as a team. We are required to put very detailed case notes for everything, as one missed bit of info may cause problems. Some clients see this as a way to shop for answers they prefer. We have a selection of frequent callers, and we KNOW them by first name and know the history of the case. It’s not unusual to hear that So-and-so promised something that is completely beyond our ability. When we try to explain Nooo, we can’t say/do that (if we like our jobs), and the notes state you were told XYZ, it’s not uncommon to get disconnected. And that client calling the following day, hoping to get another answer.

3

This isn’t my story, but I’m relating it to you all anyway. Muahaha!

My girlfriend works in retail. In particular she works in a kind of high end place where they sell expensive designer jeans to wee little childrens. It is very important that the small people in Santa Barbara look every bit as put together as the big people who feed them.

She had this woman come in to the store with a bag from a different store (not a very nice store) packed with clothes from various places. She spins this whole story about how she has some stuff to return–no receipt, of course–that her brother had bought for her four year old son. So she pulls out of the bag a size 3 year girls’ t-shirt, 2 year boys’ t-shirt, and an 18 month pair of jeans.

Customer: :confused:
Girlfriend: Um…
Customer: I don’t know what he was thinking, buying 18 month jeans for a four year old.
Girlfriend: O… K. Did he buy them here?
Customer: I don’t know.
Girlfriend: …
Customer: Well, the people at the [grown-up version store] told me I could return them.
Girlfriend: Oh. Who did you talk to?
Customer: I can’t remember.
Girlfriend: Man? Woman?
Customer: I can’t remember that! It was like, three weeks ago.
Girlfriend: Well, we have a 30 day return policy. When did your brother buy these?
Customer: I don’t know.
Girlfriend: Well, can you contact him and ask him?
Customer: …
Girlfriend: When he bought them or where he bought them?
Customer: I can’t do that. He’s overseas.
Girlfriend: :dubious:
Customer: :confused:
Girlfriend: :frowning:
Customer: :mad:
Girlfriend: …
Customer: d&r

4

I get this a lot at my retail job, especially when people are trying to return merchandise. Most lying customers seem to have a notion that the store’s employees are not assigned to specific departments, and/or have constant turnover, and will try to make reference to things that are very easy to research and disprove.

Customer: Oh, there’s a man in pharmacy that said they would refund the money…
Me: I’m the only male who works in pharmacy, and… no, this is a product we haven’t carried for years. We can’t give a refund.
Customer: Well, I talked to this guy a couple of weeks ago so you probably don’t know him.
Me: I’ve worked in the pharmacy for 14 years, ma’am, and the last time another male worked there was 6 months ago, which is well beyond the time in which we can give refunds.

Or they’ll make claims of having purchased a product on a specific day-- we can look up day by day sales, last scan dates, and such for any product we carry. “We haven’t sold one of these for two months, sorry.” Or they claim a shelf tag was wrong when they made a purchase a couple of weeks ago, and that we’ve replaced it with a correct, higher tag-- this is when we point out there’s a “print date” on each tag, and this given tag is over a year old.

I’m always surprised at the customers who get prescriptions, say they are going to pay for it at an outlying register, then simply rip the bag open and dump the scan tag. They really seem surprised when we call them up the next day to inquire about payment; do they think we don’t have a method to see what presecriptions have been released but not paid for? (Not to mention that they stupidly dump the scan tag-- containing their name, address, phone number, insurance info, plus private medical information-- on a shelf or the floor, exposing themselves to anyone curious enough to pick it up.)

5

He may actually not be working. Just because he answers the phone with the company’s name doesn’t mean he’s getting jobs. Just means he wants to get jobs.

6

Kythereia: at box office
Munchkins: We wanna see [insert PG13-rated movie here. I think it was “Meet the Spartans”].
Kythereia: How old are you?
Munchkin 1: :confused: Twelve.
Munchkin 2: (very loud, very furious whisper) No! You’re *thirteen! *
Munchkin 1: :eek:
Kythereia: :rolleyes:

7

The library equivalent: we separate out children’s computers and adult computers by age. If you’re 13, you can’t use children’s computers. Kids who look like they could be around that age are asked how old they are; some are smart enough to lie about their age to get around it, but they’re still dumb because they don’t realize that we do remember regulars that are problematic. One boy’s dumb enough to try to “game the system” by getting reservations in children’s and adults’ computer sections. He’s 13, and old enough that he should understand that he gets one or the other, but not both. What’s worse is he told me about his plan within five minutes of first meeting him. Dumbass. I’ve ended his time on children’s computers before without warning, as he’s already gotten two lectures from me about how he’s only supposed to be on the adult or teen computers (Teen computers are no reservation, and there’s only six of them. First come, first served.)
We rotate people’s section assignments throughout the day, and I still find that some coworkers will let adults on the children’s computers close to the end of the school day. (Really, they shouldn’t be on them at all; we do get homeschoolers who come during school hours and need computer access.) :rolleyes:

8

I was having late-payment problems with a client. I call up the person who pays invoices; she says the check is going out tomorrow. A week later, still no check. I call her again, and she asks me for another copy of the invoice, as she can’t find it. :confused: (Didn’t you already mail me a check, hmmmm?) When I finally get the check, it’s postmarked well after the original date she said she mailed it.

I dumped that client not long after, for this and other reasons. God, they were a pain.

9

I think I’ve posted this story before …

I worked in discount shoe store for one year when I was in college. One day my boss saw a woman browsing through the children’s section with her young son. My boss watched silently from the end of the aisle as the woman picked up a pair of shoes marked at $17.99, grabbed a $3 clearance tag from another box, and relabeled her intended purchase.

The woman brought the shoes to the register, and they scanned in at $17.99. She smugly informed my boss that she had to ring them up at the $3 price shown on the clearance tag. My boss informed her that the box was mismarked, and that she would have to pay the full price if she wanted the shoes.

The woman became angry at this point. She told my boss that her husband was a very prominent attorney, and that they would be suing the store for false advertising. (It took every ounce of my self-restraint not to ask why $17.99 was such an ungodly expense for an attorney of her husband’s stature.) My boss calmly informed her that a case like that would be baseless when the customer was the one who switched the tags.

As the woman opened her mouth to object, her young son looked up and said, “see, Mom, I told you it wouldn’t work.”

Great parenting there, lady. :rolleyes:

10

Kythereia, that one’s awesome. It made me giggle.
Really good stories guys, keep 'em coming. :smiley:

11

My old boss was a manager at a large chain bookstore. A guy would come in and return fairly expensive cookbooks frequently. He was a food reviewer and my boss suspected him of returning promotional copies to make a little cash, but the store had a liberal return policy as long as the books were in salable condition, so she had to keep taking them.

Until one day he tried to return a book that wasn’t released yet. Busted!
They didn’t press charges but they did ban him from all the stores in a reasonable radius.

12

Why did it matter how old they were for a PG-13 movie? Do some theaters not allow kids under 13 to see PG-13 movies?

13

I was working in a computer repair store many years ago when this event occured. The worksheet with the system I was working on stated something like errors booting up, slow, nothing unusual, just typical mundane issues. I opened the case up and it’s obviously someone’s home made system, again, nothing unusual. Did I mention that when I picked up up to put it on the workbench I could hear something sliding around inside? That was the hard drive laying on the bottom of the case, never having been mounted to anything. Then there was the copius evidence of roaches and mouse droppings. My immediate reaction was, “Eeewww!! At least they’re not smokers.” Aside: No offense to the smokers, but when I open a computer up and everything is a uniform glistening brown from smoke sucked into the system there’s a problem.

I don my gloves and put things to right. My point being, this computer is entirely memorable. Customer comes in and picks it up, pays for it, and all is well.

Cut to about a month later, the owner tells me there’s a computer in my queue that the customer brought back for warranty work because it hadn’t been fixed completely the first time. No problem, things like that happen occasionally. I put it up on the bench and it’s another home made system, funny, it doesn’t look like anything I’ve worked on recently enough to be eligible for warranty work. I pulled the original ticket and it was immediately obvious that this wasn’t the same computer. The first was a desktop while the one on the bench was a tower. The drive rails that I had installed on the first (remember the loose hard drive?) were nowhere to be found. Just a few minor yet obvious differences.

I informed the owner and he called the customer to clear up the error… Obviously customer had “accidentally” brought in the wrong system and did they want me to repair it anyway as a fully billable call.

14

Heh. I’m 25, and I have to present my DL to see rated R movies at the local theater. After I got my wallet stolen, I didn’t have my DL for a few weeks, and they almost didn’t let me in to see Superbad. The lady at the front actually warned me that if I buy the ticket, and the manager kicks me out because I could not prove my age, she wouldn’t refund the cost of the ticket. My husband was livid to say the least, that he was carded too, and we actually hard to argue with the person (who was younger than both of us) to let us in. Nobody kicked us out, though.

15

Right. You have to be 17 to see an R-rated movie.

However, you don’t have to be 13 to see a PG-13 movie. That’s just a guideline. (I have dropped many an under-13 kid off to see a PG-13 movie that I didn’t particularly want to see.) If it’s common to ID kids at theatres for PG-13 movies I sure haven’t heard of it.

16

One of the doctors that I work for has a very tight schedule, and is booked out for months in advance. We occasionally get calls from patients asking to be worked in with him, because “Joe” is a very good friend of theirs, and he told them to just come in anytime they needed. The way we know they’re lying is that he never goes by Joe, the diminutive version of his first name- all of his friends and family call him Jay.

I recently caught an Accutane patient in a bald-faced lie to my face. They’re supposed to get labs drawn before every visit, and this patient had a history of being non-compliant while on Accutane, with not getting labs and noshowing appointments. He came in one day, I asked him if he had his labs done because I didn’t have them, and he said yes. He sat right there in front of me while I called all three labs he could have gone to, looking for his results. I never found them, and asked all the labs to look at their sign-in sheets, and none of them showed where he had even signed in to have blood drawn. He hadn’t had labs drawn, and not only lied to me about it, but actually sat there watching me go on a wild-goose chase. He was terminated from the practice at that point.

17

Overheard at the airline check-in counter

Customer ( a very healthy looking young male ) - Do you possibly have any seats with extra legroom? I have a bad back and it’s really acting up.

Clerk - Too bad about that back. I have an open seat in the exit row but we can’t seat anyone with problems that might keep them from being able to operate the exit door.

Customer (getting mad) What problems, I can operate the exit door.

Clerk – Sorry, you just told me you had a bad back

Customer – There’s nothing wrong with my back!!!

Clerk - Sorry

18

At the Science Center we usually get people claiming that our website said something that we KNOW it didn’t, or that the called and the voice message said such and such. Or the last time they were here, admission was free, blah blah blah. My favorite, though is: “Someone told me that such and such and yada blah blah blah, etc etc.” When we ask them who, it’s usually “I don’t know their name!”

Like the one guy who told us that our website didn’t say we were closing early. We informed him that yes, it had been there for a month. “Well, it wasn’t posted anywhere!” We showed him all the signs-the ones on the door, the one posted before the admissions line, etc. “Well no one TOLD me!” Uh, there were signs ON THE DESK COUNTER that stated this very clearly. At this point, he pretty much gave up and left.

But the BEST, was this absolute moron try about five different completely incoherant stories to try for a refund.

-First, he claimed that he drove two hours to use this one ride, which was closed (we had actually had some people get hurt, but we didn’t actually say that). This ride was never advertised in the media, or on our website, as he claimed.

-Then he told me that he was here to do a media event. So I told him I’d call across the street and talk to the media department, and see when he had it scheduled. No, no, he didn’t have it planned in advance-he just showed up. No, you can’t do that.

So I called across the street and had J, one of our customer service guys who takes care of difficult customers. He comes over, and we’re talking to the guy, and telling this guy that he HAD to get in touch with our media people in order to do a story. THEN he starts telling us that he was here to do a story for-get this-JC Penney. Mmmmkay.

His next story was that he had his own business, and he came all the way here to do a shoot for that, and blah blah blah.

NONE of his stories made sense, and he didn’t get the refund. As J said when he was gone:
“The only thing worse than a scam artist is a stupid scam artist.”

19

Both are guidelines, aren’t they? Since movies don’t even need to get MPAA ratings how would you enforce it? Wouldn’t they all be guidelines?

20

This wouldn’t happen to be a Wal-Mart pharmacy? That’s where I work and all of this is so true. I also love it when people need to get their controlled medicines early, and say “I didn’t fill it two weeks ago! It’s been at least a month!”, while I can look up their profile and tell them to the second when they picked it up.

One example that sticks out in my mind is a maybe 25-year-old guy who came in early for his… tramadol, I think, and so when the pharmacist asked him why he needed it filled early, it was because “his roommate stole it”.
Pharmacist: We’ll just need a copy of the police report you filed in order to get that early refill in the computer
Guy: What police report?
Pharmacist: Someone stole your controlled narcotic and you didn’t file a report? There really isn’t anything we can do to help you.