O2 shop requiring phone password for a repair to avoid charges

[Anonymous]

Hi All

My daughter's Samsung Galaxy developed a screen fault under warranty so I took it to my local O2 shop.

The lady who served me told me she needed the backup password otherwise the repair would generate a charge.  I queried this and she told me that it wouldn't be very secure if engineers could work on the phone without a password.  The charge could be anything up to the cost of a new phone.

I managed to get hold of the password and handed it over and was told there wouldn't be a charge.

On the way home I remembered I was told that all the data would be wiped.  OK so they will do a factory reset.  However, the password is not required for a factory reset so I'm confused as to why they would need it.

Is this a scam where they charge you for a 3 minute factory reset which they would do anyway?  More distrurbingly, they now have access to all my 14 year old daughter's private data when there was no need for it.

Am I missing something here?

Kind Regards

Steve

[Sammy_boy]

I wonder if they need the password if they back up your daughters data and then restore it when they've wiped it? Don't know if they do that in these situations?

[jonsie]

They definitely will not restore the phone. They will just send it back wiped clean after the factory reset.

[Anonymous]

No they told me they would wipe the phone and return it with no data.

Further to this, I just spoke to O2 and they told me there should be no charge for getting into the phone and the worst case would be if they couldn't repair it, to return the phone unrepaired with no charge.  The lady checked with a few of her colleagues and they all said there would be no charge so the shop is in error.  I made a complaint and asked them to speak to the shop.

On the password front, the lady I spoke to was new, and she thought you needed the password for a factory reset, which, of course is wrong so maybe O2 employees are unaware of the key combinations needed to do a factory reset without the phone password.

I'm pretty irritated by this and will tackle the staff in the shop when I pick the phone up.  Either I've been lied to in order to extract money from me, or the staff don't even know the very basics of android phones.

I'll let you know what they say.

Kind Regards

Steve

[MI5]

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@Anonymous wrote:

or the staff don't even know the very basics of android phones.

Most of the shop staff know naff all about any phones (not limited to O2 shops either)!

[Cleoriff]

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@jonsie wrote:

They definitely will not restore the phone. They will just send it back wiped clean after the factory reset.

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Exactly that ^^^^^^ my son worked for Unipart, who at the time handled repairs for Vodafone. There were different sections for each repair but he told me they rarely did anything technical...just flashed the phone..rebooted and if it came on it was fixed. He wasn't even the person who signed it off as repaired...someone else did that!.

Apparently each phone brand went to a different section and each 'technician' had a quota of phones to 'fix' per shift (this quota affected salary) ...I leave the rest to your imagination