Re: Wasn't this the usual cashing-out issue?
Elongated Muskrat,
Although maybe Phones 4 U suffered from the same thing from the mobile companies?
I remember being handed a horrible mess when I started working for a UK office supplies retailer over 20 years ago. We'd got loads of mobiles. From memory we only sold Pay-as-you-go handsets. We were supposed to get paid a rebate when the handset was sold - and then another rebate from the network when a Pay&Go SIM was registered for it on their network. But as far as I could tell, coming into it a couple of years after the event - we'd been paid somewhere between none of the rebates owed to us, and maybe about 10%.
The issue was further complicate by the fact that the wholesaler we'd bought the phones from didn't have any plastic shop samples for us. So they sold us some extra handsets as samples, again we were supposed to get a rebate for those that we couldn't sell on - when they finally replaced them with the samples we needed. No samples ever turned up, no rebate was ever paid for the difference in cost in the fact we'd had to use real handsets as samples. And this was way before the era of smartphones on display with wired and alarmed things fixed to them - so basically all our samples were usable mobile phones that merely needed a charger - and so had been stolen. Possibly by the shop staff, who of course had the charger and box in the back of the store - but I didn't say that...
I also did a temp job before that retail job for an insurance company. They did the handset insurance for DX Communications. And a good 10-30% of the insurance agreements I saw had the forms filled in, in different ink and with different signatures than the contract forms. Sales staff in the stores got a bonus for everyone who signed up for an insurance contract with their phone contract and so a lot of people mysteriously did. The banks had given the insurance company an exemption for being reliable that tey didn't have to pass the actual direct debit paperwork on to the banks to check - they just had to say the'd checked it themslelves. For their normal insurance clients, that was probably a reasonable and sound decision. In the mobile industry I've never dealt with a single company I'd trust as far as I can throw them. Not quite fair. The original Hutchinson version of Orange were well-run and a pleasure to do business with.