Don't Rush to "Save" Your Phone: How Service Centers Deceive Customers

What do we do when our favorite smartphone or tablet suddenly stops working? Of course, we give them to the "professionals". At the same time, few people worry that the gadget will be in the hands of a complete stranger for several days... And this person will have complete power over it.

The founder of the program for accounting of orders in service centers and workshops Alexander Makarov studied the dark side of such enterprises. Below are the words of the author, which describe in detail real stories of deception of clients and the most popular methods of deception.

A common situation: you are trying to answer a message with one hand while paying for a shawarma in a cheese lavash with the other, at that moment someone pushes you, and the phone plops down on the ground. You got away with it - next to a puddle, didn't get wet, but turned off.

Most likely, the battery just went out. This can be fixed in two minutes - you don't even need spare parts. But at the service center they tell you that everything burned out because water got in. Repairs cost a lot of money and a couple of months without shawarma for lunch.

Or the phone freezes, the screen is black, there is no response to the power button, and the service staff writes out a death notice. In fact, in 90 cases out of 100, it is enough to hold down a couple of buttons and mechanically reboot the device. You don’t even need to go to a repairman for this. And I have seen people pay thousands of rubles for this.

Another example. The charging socket in smartphones often gets clogged. It is not protected by a case, so sometimes so much dust accumulates there that contact is lost - the phone does not charge. At first, you pray that the problem is in the charger, buy a new one, cry that it does not work again. You think that the repair will be expensive. You go to a service center, where the master says that you need to do a complex repair of the motherboard, change the cable, buy a charger from them.

Actually, you just need to clean the nest.

The repair prices are about the same for all services. But the prices for spare parts are different. A good service uses expensive, high-quality parts, while scammers install the cheapest ones for the same price, making a good profit on this. Most likely, you will never know what you got. If it works, that's good. If it breaks again, it will be difficult to prove that it was the new part that broke and that it happened because of its quality.

Some services pull spare parts from phones to assemble a working device and sell it. The repairman can replace the original stuffing with a non-original one, without telling the client anything. You bring a smartphone for a screen replacement, and get a repaired device with a new screen and half of the spare parts - you won't bother checking it. And you won't be able to. And when the new "organs" start to malfunction, you are unlikely to have even a suspicion.

Fraudsters make good money on the global manufacturer's warranty. If the manufacturer finds a defect in the product, it repairs the devices for free or even replaces them with new ones until the warranty period expires.

You obviously don't know this, but the service centers do. They tell you that the phone can't be fixed, buy it for parts for next to nothing, and then replace it under warranty and get a new device. At this time, you're typing happy SMS messages about how you sold a non-working smartphone to suckers from the service center.

The service may ask the customer for the screen lock password. The technician needs it to check the functionality of the device and new spare parts. If your phone contains important or confidential information, it is better to copy it before repair and hand in the device for repair already reset to factory settings.

Device is blocked (send money here...)

Knowing the Apple ID, the device can be blocked. The service center can do this remotely both a month and a year after the repair, you will not be able to prove that it was they who did it.

The problem is that the device is locked on the activation servers - it is impossible to unlock it. Therefore, if you neglect the passwords of your Apple ID and Google accounts, make them simple like "qwerty", "123456" or even tell them to anyone, sooner or later a scammer will take advantage of this. He will demand money for unlocking. If you pay, most likely, they will demand more from you.

Or another example.

A service center can buy your phone as something that can't be repaired. And then sell it to someone on the market. It sounds crazy, but it happens quite often. And even large well-known services get burned on this.

So, one fine day after selling the "killed" device, someone can call you or write a personal message to any account that was logged into that phone to find out the password to the device or even with a direct threat. For example, send your photos to the contact list. If you don't want it, pay. The way out is to go to the police, because such blackmail may never end, and the service will deny it until the very end. And even then, it is far from certain that they will help you there.

If the battery, screen or speaker are changed, the service center provides a guarantee. But bad service will never be recognized if the repeated breakdown occurs due to the fault of this spare part.

I had such a case in my practice. A client repaired a new phone in a service center. A trivial repair, but the phone broke again. The client went to the service center again, where they said that moisture got into the phone, everything was already corroded, and they refused to fix it, because moisture inside is an official reason to refuse a warranty.

After that the client came to us.

When we opened the phone, we could see salt crystals soaked in water on the motherboard. This was most likely done at the service center. They could have damaged something serious during the repair and wanted to avoid responsibility in this way, so as not to accept the phone for warranty repair. As a result, the client went to court, but the matter was settled peacefully - the service center got scared and paid the full cost of the phone.

A service center can't do a lot of work first and then ask for money for it. If they call you and say that instead of replacing the speaker, they re-soldered all the chips and heroically saved the phone - praise us, be grateful, pay ten times more, this is crazy. It's normal if the center says that they carried out diagnostics, explains what needs to be fixed and how much it will cost. If you are not satisfied, you can refuse and take the phone back.

Sometimes they may say that they will at least try to fix the device. If it works, you will pay, if not, you will not, although the work has been done. But you should not be faced with the fact that everything is ready and you need to pay $200. You can refuse to pay for an unauthorized repair or demand that the phone be returned to its original condition.

We had several cases when the repairman was slow and fixed the device before agreeing with the client. We tried to explain the situation. If the client refused to pay, we returned the now working phone for free. For us, this was even advertising. The client left and told everyone that his phone was fixed "for free".

If the phone is under warranty, contact the official service. The warranty applies to any original device, even if there is no box, receipt or warranty card. If the manufacturer has acknowledged the defect, you can get a new device under warranty or replace the part for free.