Best Buy Scamming Customers using Phishing-Like Scheme?

George Gombossy, Consumer Watchdog who writes for the Hartford Connecticut Courant, has confirmed first-hand that Best Buy has good reason for using its employee kiosks and links to the “bestbuy.com” website to verify sales prices customers are expecting to find. It’s not the real website, but a fake Intranet site made up to look just like bestbuy.com. In the allegations presented, a customer comes in asking about a sale price they saw online. The clerk says that sale isn’t available anymore. The customer says they’ll show you. The clerk brings up the pages on the kiosk and … what the???… no sale price! I guess I must have been wrong… your browser may have had page cached… ..yeah right.

Make sure you print out the real sale prices before you come in! And be sure to capture the entire URL on the printout.

If they try to pull this crap on you, I guess you could fight fire with fire, and phish out your hosts file to make your very own bestbuy.com before coming in. If you’re running Windows Mobile, you can do it on your device, surf to bestbuy.com, and show the clerk right there in the store! See, 60″ plasma, $999… it’s right there on the site! Now, now… I don’t condone any such behavior, of course, as we all know that phishing is probably illegal in the real world. This is just fantasy stuff.

I think that the State Attorney General is about to file a big honkin’ lawsuit, and you may see a big class action on this one.� Perhaps they’re cloaking based on the IPs of the stores? Perhaps a central proxy? It’s far too technical for most lawyers and too easy make the issue go away.

oodness this stuff is sleazy.

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