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| Edited By: Uttara Choudhury |Source: DNA |Updated: Aug 07, 2010, 12:13 AM IST
Tara Fitzgerald opened a can of worms by threatening to sue Dell this week over her shocking experience with a Mumbai tech rat.
It turned out Dell techie Riyaz Shaikh downloaded nude pictures of the American caller during a tech-help request after she gave him remote access to her computer.
Shaikh downloaded 16 pictures from Fitzgerald’s computer during the trans-Atlantic call to create a porn site Bitchtara.
Oh, the creepy Mumbai techie also used Fitzgerald’s Dell credit card to send a $800 Valentine’s Day gift to a Tennessee woman he had chatted up on another call. How on earth does such tripe get past Dell when it records customer calls for training purposes?
The Riyaz Shaikh incident is a wake-up call for India’s tech services industry. It has to purge sleazebags like Shaikh because one slimy techie can spook millions of trusting Americans desperate for tech support.
Shaikh could be a freak aberration. I have received first-rate service whenever I have been bounced to an Indian call centre from New York. A few weeks ago my HP laptop began sputtering. To get a geek in Manhattan to just diagnose my laptop would cost $150. So I dialled HP tech support instead and was soon talking to cool and professional Aruna in Bangalore.
She heard me out and then gave me instructions to fix the problem. Twenty minutes into the session I was struggling with firewalls and running system checks. Aruna gently asked if I would like her to take remote control of my laptop. I was utterly relieved! She emailed a legal agreement to me; I ticked the box, and before I knew it, she was ‘in’, using her mouse and keyboard to control my laptop remotely.
It was surreal watching Aruna opening my laptop programmes from half a world away while I made small talk. She told me it would take 40 minutes so I moseyed off to grab a sandwich at Starbucks.
It didn’t occur to me that Aruna might nose through personal files. Did I have stuff on my laptop? Sure. If Aruna was the Wicked Witch of the East she could have downloaded and then sold pictures of my son sitting with his rubber duckies in his bathtub to a smutty child porn site.
My laptop also had scanned copies of my passport and bank information. I guess I was lucky — I got the tech goddess in Bangalore who repaired my laptop and not the Mumbai tech rat.
