Sold me a phone they don't have

[wibble]

Ten days ago o2 sold me a phone and a new contract.

It's now clear they didn't have any phones available and knew this. Rumour is there are 30,000 people waiting for a phone that isn't going to arrive because there is 'No ETA on delivery at this time'. Many of these will be Christmas presents.

On top of that they won't let me cancel because it's 'in process'. So I've paid for a phone. I can't have the phone. I can't cancel the phone. I'm stuck. How rubbish is that??

And yet still they're selling phones. With no stock. Erm, isn't that... fraud?

[Enlli]

Probably more like total incompetence 

[jonsie]

Fraud?

No but it is a disgraceful business practice and completely unethical!

[pgn]

Had you been sent a house brick in an iPhone or a Samsung box, that would have been fraud...

https://lowendbox.com/blog/the-time-a-hard-drive-manufacturer-shipped-actual-bricks-instead-of-drive...

Dead of the Night

In July 1987, Johnson and crew of managers rented a new warehouse, and meticulously packed bricks into hard drive packaging.  The bricks were about the size and nearly the exact weight of a hard drive from that era.  Each brick was even assigned a serial number.

Shortly thereafter, these units were injected into the inventory by sending them to Singapore, and then receiving them in America as finished goods.

Of course, they weren’t finished goods.  But the idea was that they company could keep its external auditors happy (see, we have that $15 million in hard drives) and slowly write off the drives as “defective” over the next couple years.  It’d be a drag on earnings but not a catastrophic $15 million hit, and no one would ever know.

And they almost got away with it.

Unfortunately, the PC market slumped in 1988-89 and Miniscribe found itself under tremendous pressure.  They responded by turning to other classic fraud techniquess, such as channel-stuffing (sending extra product to wholesalers and recording the sales, even though they’ll inevitably return it a few months later).

Eventually, Miniscribe couldn’t keep up the fraud and auditors discovered the shenanigans.  Miniscribe declared bankruptcy in January 1990 and Maxtor acquired the shell a few months later.  Several managers went to prison – in part because they’d timed their stock sales rather obviously – but Johnson escaped and went on to found another drive maker that was acquired by Connor Peripherals in 1986,

And the bricks?

The bricks were real – managers admitted as much under criminal investigation – but there are a couple amusing legends.

One is that employees, disgruntled over being shorted severance, moved the “brick” inventory into the regular inventory stream, resulting in customers and retail stores receiving packages that looked identical to Miniscribe drives on the outside but had masonry inside.  This lead to someone tipping off investigators.

Another legend is that employees took a few packaged bricks home with them, and somewhere a collector still has a Miniscribe serial-numbered brick in their collection.

[Bambino]

@wibble For as long as I can remember, O2 have never operated a live stock reporting system, which is why I've always bought my phones elsewhere. Unfortunately, as immoral as their practice is, it's not illegal.

[jonsie]

The word is IMMORAL...

[pgn]

Or AMORAL 🤐

[Bambino]

The OP can take their pick of all the adjectives or use them all. Bottom line is they won't be getting a phone when they thought they would thanks to VMO2.