Iain @ Internet

So far as I can see, Identity Theft is very rarely about people raking through your bin; it is usually much more like this.

Inside theft from within big organisations with poorly secured customer databases are a far greater threat.

Well, the end of an era…..i’ve given up my Rangers season ticket after 20 years.

Admittedly this is partly to do with another truly bad season – no trophies for the second year running; but in practice it is more to do with the fact that living in London means that I only attend 5-6 games a year. I also don’t like the ‘lock-in’ approach that means I have to commit to buying tickets for all European games before the draw has been made – very inflexible and no use for those not living in Glasgow.

Anyway, the way the ticket situation is these days, I can just as easily buy a ticket for the games I want to see.

Of course, so far as Rangers are concerned – they won’t notice; as technically i’ve not given it up. My brother is taking it over and paying me for it. Of course if Rangers would adopt a more realistic/ customer friendly set of processes, we would not have to tackle things this way – not much chance of that happening; football clubs remain one of the less advanced sectors in terms of customer-friendly processes. No doubt this is a legacy of demand for tickets outweighing supply – eventually they will recognise that this is rarely still the case.

I was trying to renew one of my domain names that was bought originally through this lot. Despite sending me e-mails regularly, their customer log-in (which uses e-mail) refused to recognise my e-mail address so I could not get in to renew.

So….I had to then phone them up at a cost of 10p per minute. After 40 minutes on hold I got through to Peter – he said that he had to look up some information and that he’d call me back after 2 the next day – by which point I had one day left before the domain expired. From our discussion, I had very little confidence that this call-back was in fact going to happen – so I checked with Peter who re-assured me that he would indeed call back the following day to progress.

……guess what…..no call back. Thankfully I then found a way to renew the domain through the reseller I use who have an account with 123reg.

Needless to say, any business I have with 123reg is now about to be shifted.

This ongoing court case over bank charges looks set to rumble on for a while – although I don’t see how any can doubt that the bank charge regime quoted was based on excessive profits.

The much bigger issue, I suspect, will be this – the UK Information Commissioners investigation into practicies within Barclays call centres. There must be a lot of call centre managers panicking at present – Barclays are unlikely to be the only ones whose practices merit investigation.