By Scott Colvey on Wednesday, 09 July 2008
 No, that headline isn’t a joke – UK mobile operator O2 is busy telling would-be purchasers of the iPhone 3G to take scans of their most sensitive personal documents and bank cards and email them through to the company.
Some customers today received an email from O2 asking them to provide additional information. They are urged to do so quickly under pain of having their order delayed. We know this because it happened to one of us.
A non-geographic (ie, costly) 0870 telephone number is provided for customers to call – 0870 4444713. This is not the usual O2 customer contact number and is answered in a different way to other O2 numbers. It doesn’t Google reassuringly, either. Once answered, the caller is told they are being transferred to an attendent: the phone then rings and rings. And rings some more. We let ours ring for 45 minutes before wising up and calling the main O2 contact number for guidance.
Frustrating enough so far... but then the situation descended into security farce. More after the cut.
While on hold on to the suspect number we called another O2 customer contact line. We were passed around a bit and eventually ended up talking to a chap who said he thought the email was real but from a “much higher-up department – the fraud-prevention department”. He said that the number was indeed an O2 number and that all the time it was ringing, we were in fact on hold.
But after spending £3.60 on hold listening to nothing but a ringing tone, we decided to hang up. No matter, our adviser said, we could submit the requested security details electronically. All we had to do was scan our passport or driving license and a credit card and email it to O2. Email is hardly renowned for being a secure method of exchanging personal documents, so we declined this suggestion.
As O2 advisers were all out of ideas as to what we should do next as genuine customers, we put a call in to the O2 press office to ask if the company’s fraud-prevention department really does recommend customers use email to transport highly sensitive personal information. We’ll update you with their response the moment they get back to us.
UPDATE: We still haven’t had word back from O2’s press people about the above. However, they did email last night (9 July) to say they were looking into it.
In the meantime, this morning we spent another 45 minutes on hold with the aforesaid 0870 number ringing in our ears – and then got an answer. The O2 attendant confirmed that the email was genuine and that we’d need to go through a few more “security procedures”. This amounted to reading out a driver’s license number, credit card number and three-digit security code. The latter of these had anyway previously been supplied to O2.
And that, apparently, is that – we can expect delivery of our iPhone 3G tomorrow. If it arrives, we’ll be quick to put up an unboxing video right away, and a first-impressions review a little later.
But what of O2’s earlier request to have us email through scans of a passport and credit card? “Well, I don’t need you to do that,” the O2 attendant assured us. So why were we prompted to do so yesterday? The attendant had no answer and, as noted, we await still a response from O2’s PR folks.
UPDATE: O2's PR department has issued the following response:
Yes, the number does belong to O2 and is being used to verify the identify of people who placed orders. The team have been processing a huge number of these since Monday and we can only apologise for the failure to answer the phone within an acceptable timeframe.
The information you were given at the alternate number is incorrect. The Fraud & Security team can validate your identity through a phone call. In some rare cases they may ask someone to fax a copy of their proof of ID to a secure fax machine but they would not ask for scans to be emailed.
It’s unfortunate that you were given this wrong information but I can assure you that our policy is not to ask customers to email sensitive personal documents.
So, if you too were asked to scan your passport or driving license and a credit card and email the images to
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, don't.
[O2]
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