Building Your Own Coffin

I work for a mobile phone company in the UK. A customer calls me querying his bill, but he gives permission for me to talk to his girlfriend since he isn’t “good with financial stuff”.

Girlfriend: “Why did you take £75 out of [Customer]’s bank account this month?”

I pull up the bill.

Me: “There are no extra charges. Phone line [number #1] costs [amount #1], and phone line [number #2] costs [amount #2], and the two together total £75.”

Girlfriend: “What are you talking about? He only has one phone number with you.”

Me: “No, there are two numbers. He’s had them both for about eighteen months, and his bill has always been around this amount, so I am unsure why he’s only querying this now.”

Girlfriend: “Can you tell me what the second number is again?”

I tell her the last three digits. I hear rummaging on her side, and then she starts going off at the boyfriend. It turns out that number belongs to “the girl he told her she didn’t need to worry about”.

Girlfriend: *To me* “Can you email me the last couple of bills so I can check them?”

I know they will go to his email address, but it doesn’t seem to matter as the girlfriend seems to have access to his emails, and it doesn’t matter anyway since he authorized her to act on his behalf. I know s*** is really gonna hit the fan when she sees the bill since the itemized usage shows literally hundreds of texts and dozens of hours of phone calls between the boyfriend’s number and the number of “the other woman”.

He jumps on the line and tries to claim this woman is committing fraud by stealing his bank account details and taking out a second phone line on his account, but I patiently explain to him that would be impossible. We have very strict security measures and there’s no way we’d let someone take out a second line on a person’s account without going through a LOT of verification first. Also, all of the messages confirming the order for the second phone line would have gone to HIS phone number, as well as notification that we’d set up a direct debit on his bank account for the payments.

Me: “Sorry, but there’s no way you did not know about this for a year and a half.”

His girlfriend just screamed at him in the background.

Moral of the story: if you’re cheating on your girlfriend, don’t give her permission to go poking around in your phone records.