Rogers left my hacked newsroom on hold for 77 minutes
Email scam that targeted local seniors shows how little a giant telecom cares about rural small businesses
There are bad days in community journalism, and then there are days when you realize a giant corporation holds the keys to your entire business and simply does not care. Last week my Pass Herald email account, which is hosted through Rogers, was hacked, and the ordeal that followed was one of the most infuriating experiences I have had as a publisher.
The hackers got into my account, diverted my email to themselves and started firing off messages to every person they could find in my contact list. The first email asked if recipients had received my message. Innocent enough that most people would respond. Once they did, the scammers followed up with something far more sinister. They claimed I had cancer and needed an Amazon gift card. In other cases they said a friend’s daughter had cancer and needed the same thing. These are not random excuses. They are calculated. Most people in this community know I had cancer. They know someone asking for help would not seem out of character. It was close enough to believable that it could have worked.
And it almost did. I had two seniors call me directly to ask how much I needed. Let that sink in. Seniors in our community, many of them on fixed incomes and vulnerable to manipulation, were moments away from sending money because of a scam that happened through my email account. That is how close this came to becoming something far worse than an inconvenience. It was emotional and stressful and absolutely infuriating.
But this editorial is not actually about the hackers. It is about Rogers, the company that made an already terrible situation worse. When I discovered what was happening, I immediately tried to get help. I was put on hold. Not for five minutes. Not for 20. I waited 77 minutes before I could reach a human being. For 77 minutes, those fraudulent emails were being sent out to my community. For 77 minutes, my account remained compromised. For 77 minutes, I sat there watching chaos unfold while a multi billion dollar corporation left me dangling on a phone line.
The worst part is how unsurprising it was. As I fielded almost 100 calls and emails from wonderful community members trying to warn me, the reaction was the same every time. When I told them I had been on hold with Rogers, the universal response was, not surprised at all. Since Rogers bought out Shaw, the sentiment I hear over and over from residents is that the service has become brutal. People feel it. Businesses feel it. And last week, I felt it in the worst possible way.
Rogers has no trouble taking money from my account on time every month. They do not sit on hold for 77 minutes waiting for me to pay. But when a small business in rural Alberta is dealing with a live security breach that is targeting seniors and exploiting a very personal medical history, the response is essentially, take a number. That is what happens when companies are allowed to get so big they no longer feel accountable to the people who pay their bills. Customer service becomes optional. Rural customers become afterthoughts. And small businesses are left to fend for themselves.
By the end of the day, I had spent hours calling people to apologise, explaining what happened and trying to contain the damage. Then I went home and, like any human who had just lived through that circus, poured myself a couple of glasses of wine to try to decompress. The next morning I had a hangover, and the sad truth is the hangover was easier to deal with than Rogers’ customer service.
On a positive note, once I finally reached my technician, Stacey, the fix was quick and smooth. He was professional and helpful, and it took everything in me not to unload all my frustration on him, because none of this was his fault. The fault lies squarely with a corporation that has forgotten who it serves.