I would like to believe that it was just lack of knowledge from the customer support representative, but my experience tells me that this kind of situation is not having the appropriated attention from CSPs. The same thing happened in banking until they realize the growing losses that were resulting from credentials theft.

CSPs are heavily investing in electronic channels to manage accounts and subscribe services, but are incurring in the same negligence that banking did and that has started being minimized only when banks assumed that fraud exists and their customers need to know about them and need to know how can they prevent it.

My perception is that, for CSPs, this is still a taboo subject, but surely we have different realities in different CSPs. It would be interesting to have opinions from our members on this.

I know that I received communications from financial institutions warning about phishing attempts, but I can't recall ever receiving anything similar from my telecom, or cable, or any other type of service provider.

Hopefully all industries and companies will start to take this seriously.

Hi Steve

I believe that CSR in telecom industry are still not mature to an extend that they can understand all problems and resolve them or escalate them properly, specially in India. When I call to Bank CSR and try to get solution, I feel more satisfied than when I call a CSP CSR. May be that in fast moving industry and high attrition, it is difficult to train them or may be that CSPs are investing very low/outsourcing to cheap vendors for CSR services that prefer to avoid investment per say in them. Its my personal experience with my service provider and others may defer. More thoughts on this may help all.

While I will agree that my CSR experiences with banking are almost always satisfactory, I have to admit that my experiences with my wireless provider (AT&T) have also been pretty good, expecially in the last few years.

Not sure I have the same praise for my cable company though.

I don't know that I can infer any generaizations about why one is better than the other, other than the fact that my bank and wireless companies are much bigger, older, and more profitable that my cable company, so perhaps they can afford to (or feel the need to) invest in better quality customer care.

I love the closing line:

"I'd suggest that the industry should at least set a basic goal of making the fraudsters at least break a sweat as they perpetrate their nasty business."

If only this was possible.

I think the awareness is often linked to the levels of crime or perceived levels of crime in a country. In South Africa we have a relatively high crime rate and this raises everyones awareness so we have multiple mechanisms for reporting crime and I do not believe that this is true where the general population does not come into contact with crime on a regular basis.