by Serguey Shinder
The second dispute arrived on a Friday, and it was the spacing that gave it away. A customer had sent us a screenshot of a confirmation email showing a price of nineteen pounds a month. We have never charged nineteen pounds a month. Our finance lead only caught it because a different customer, six weeks earlier, had sent a screenshot with the same slightly wrong gap under the total, and she had kept it.
Between the two of them we had refunded a little under four thousand eight hundred pounds, entirely correctly according to our own procedure, which says that where a customer can evidence what they were quoted, we honour it. That procedure was written in 2016 by people, including me, who thought it generous and sensible. It rests on an assumption none of us wrote down, which is that forging a convincing copy of your own confirmation email, in your own template, costs more effort than the sum being argued about.
The assumption held for a very long time. It does not hold now. It took me a few minutes and no particular skill to produce a better fake of that email than either of the two we had been sent.
Having done it once I could not stop finding the same assumption elsewhere in the building. Expenses, where a photograph of a receipt is the record. Account recovery, where an agent looks at an image of a driving licence and forms a view. Supplier bank details, changed on the strength of a letter on headed paper. Proof of address. The invoice a partner emails us as a document. Every one of those steps verifies something by looking at it, and looking at it was never really the check. The cost of making it was the check.
What we changed is narrow. Disputes are answered from our own billing record, and a customer's screenshot is now treated as a description of what they believe rather than as proof of what occurred. A change of supplier bank details is confirmed by telephoning a number we already held, never one printed on the letter requesting it. Anything above a threshold requires a matching entry on our side rather than an image.
None of that required us to get better at spotting forgeries, which I think is a contest nobody is going to win from here.
So when I now meet a process that says send us a copy, I ask two things. If this were fabricated, at what point would anybody find out. And is there a record on our own side we could consult instead of looking at the picture. For most of my career the answers did not matter, because making the thing cost more than the claim was worth. We treated that as a control. It was a price, and the price has gone.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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