Posted on consumerist.com: I worked for Best Buy 285 several years ago (2003-2005) and was both a Blackshirt and an Agent once the Geek Squad rolled out.
At my store, searching and copying files was not a common practice at all. We were the good guys of the district. One day, however, a gorgeous woman walked in with her computer complaining of her PC locking up when she went to use her webcam. She refused to give us her website so we knew something was up. She authorized us to do a tune-up to remove unneeded files and update her to SP2. During the cleanup process, we saw that her Norton Protected Recycle Bin was consuming 12gigs of files. It was password protected…but she used the same password as her windows login (which users provide on one of the thousand forms they fill out when they drop the PC off).
Once we got into the recycle bin, we realized it was entirely filled with naked pictures and movies. It turns out that this young woman was a pornstar named Jasmine Grey (link safe for work)”
I left for the day and came back the next day to find that one of our fellow employees had copied all of the files to a few dvd’s and shared them with management, as well as most of the other techs.
Her webcam was still locking up her machine when she took her computer home that night, so she returned again in the morning. She still wouldn’t provide us with her site (not that we needed it anyway at that point), but she did want to look into purchasing a new machine. At this point I handed her off to a PCHO rep who proceeded to convince her that instead of buying a new machine…she should just have an Agent come out to fix it at her house (that way she “could rest easy that her privacy would be assured”).
The manager on duty at the time was involved in the scam, so he offered to send an Agent out for free to “go the extra mile and insure she only shop at Best Buy in the future” Of course, the Agent that came out to her house was none other than the same person who copied all her files to DVD. He fixed the webcam in a few minutes then spent the entire remainder of the appointment scouring her network for more porn, which he saved to a portable hard drive. Those files were then shared across the store.
The sad part is that she passed away in a car crash only days later which quickly formed rainclouds over everyone’s perverted parade.
So how about that? Not only did the techs steal porn from a customer…they forfeited the revenue from a new computer AND from an on-site visit for the sole purpose of getting more porn.
I left the company 3 weeks later.