Re: Red flags
The company was trusted to send strangers - its employees - into vulnerable people's homes to provide services that they needed and paid for. The company had a duty of care to safeguard these vulnerable people, who assumed that it was performing its duty of care whenever they let in one of its technicians. The company failed to abide by its duty of care, and exposed customers to employees who were dishonest, who committed crimes against them, and who constituted a potential danger to their lives; this failing culminated in one of these vulnerable people being murdered.
It strikes at the very core of the way of life we live, in which people, especially vulnerable people, depend on total strangers to provide services and repair things for them. It exposes the fallacy of all the safeguards that turn out to be merely imaginary, and it creates a serious threat of destabilisation of modern society as a result.
Against that, $ 7.3 billion is not an inordinate penalty, as its sheer size is likely to encourage other trusted service provider companies to improve their procedures and generally enhance the security of millions of people across the Western World.