Current Events > People are are so bad at lying it's insulting.

(+) Yeah! (+)

I work customer service over the phone, and the average customer is a moron. That's normally fine as long as they're a polite moron. I'm perfectly happy reciprocating politeness while explaining that I don't know what their mailing ZIP code is on their debit card, for instance, as that's something they need to provide to me for me to process a debit payment.

But people also like to lie to me because.... fucking, I don't know. They assume I'm a moron too I guess. I just had a man call in pretending to be "Sarah" to make changes to "Sarah's" account. The man I'm guessing was either Sarah's boyfriend or dad. I'm guessing that, because while he was pretending to be "Sarah", he was whispering to the actual Sarah (or someone with Sarah's info) to confirm the personal verification info. Why do this? Well, Federal Privacy Law makes it illegal for us to disclose Personally Identifiable Information to people we have not done our due dilligence in confirming the identity of. I would need to first confirm within reason I was speaking with Sarah (Or a pre-established legal representative) to disclose Sarah's personal information. Reasonable, right? All I would have to do is speak with the real Sarah for 10 seconds in order to get authorization to speak with her boyfriend. Instead, after confirming that there was, legally speaking, identity fraud being committed, I had to advise the caller of such and disconnect the call. Thanks for wasting both of our time and insulting my intelligence, "Sarah". I hope it was worth the "convenience".

My favorite one is when a mother called in to make a payment on her daughter's policy. Pretty common. Except the mother decided to present herself as her daughter. Now, I couldn't "prove it" it at the time as she provided the necessary identifiable info without suspicion, but you do this job long enough and it's pretty obvious when people are lying. Whatever, continued with the call. I brought up my payment system and asked for the name on the card. The card was in the mother's name.

Here's a wonderful conundrum--If I'm taking a card payment and the cardholder is different from the caller, I need to confirm with the cardholder via verbal authorization that we can make the payment. The mother, pretending to be the daughter, is making a payment in the mother's name. The mother can't say it's her card without admitting she lied about being the daughter. SO SHE CALLS HER DAUGHTER OVER, AND TELLS HER TO PRETEND TO BE THE CARDHOLDER TO AUTHORIZE THE CARD PAYMENT. People, I guess, don't realize I can hear them whispering. We have officially gone full circle. The mother is the daughter, and the daughter is the mother. But that's not the best part. The best part is, the mother did not even need to lie to begin with because she had permanent authorization on the policy already. And if she had just NOT FUCKING LIED TO ME to begin with I could have told her that. God damn people, man.

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I've had people pretend to be others when making payments, and it always goes poorly for them.

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In regards to "Sarah" could you not have explained "Sir/Ma'am, I need to speak with Sarah"

Or are you not legally allowed or allowed by company policy to call them in their BS?

Never underestimate the stupidity of the general public.

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I pretended to be my dad all the time back when he made me pay his bills over the phone cause he didn't wanna go through the menu of pressing buttons to get to a person

what're you gonna do about it huh?!

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dumb people generally comically overestimate their basic intelligence.

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I have to call for my parents all the time because they don't speak English. The authorization process is infuriating because my dad and I have conflicting schedules most of the week. And when we do get together, I have to translate and coach him through the entire thing.

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New book by Malcom Gladwell called Talking With Strangers. It talks about peoples lie detectors. Really good read.

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Error1355 posted...

I've had people pretend to be others when making payments, and it always goes poorly for them.

I had someone try to pay using card information wrote on a piece of paper.

They didnt even have a Photo Id(or ID period) so my manager shot that down.

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Ludwig Von 2 posted...

New book by Malcom Gladwell called Talking With Strangers. It talks about peoples lie detectors. Really good read.

Seconding this.

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