Friday, May 09, 2014

The mystery of the Bell network interface

Yesterday, Catherine discovered a "record of work completed" stuck behind the front screen-door of her father's recently-sold house. It suggested that a Bell technician had come that day and "completed all work" at no charge. The name given for the address was D. Bonnell and the telephone/order# was 248-4913. The back of the form suggested that a network interface device had been installed and, sure enough, Catherine noticed that such a thing was indeed at the side of the house.



Alas, we do not know this person that initiated the installation. We checked with the realtor to make sure that it had nothing to do with the purchaser of the house who will not take possession until the end of the month. Unfortunately this came on the heels of another incident where an unknown-to-us "Don Criss" was trying to use the house as a drop-off for a package delivery, so we were somewhat paranoid about fraudulent activity involving an obviously empty, just-sold residence.

So my son called Bell to have the device removed. As it was still there today, Catherine became very upset. She phoned Bell to inquire about the removal. Not only did they have no record of someone having requested the removal of the device the previous day, it took her about forty minutes to have a new request on record. She was told that the person claiming her father's residence for the installation was a "Donna" Bonnell. Catherine pointed out that the phone number leads also (using a different reverse-411 service) to a W. Abouelkheir but of course that may have been a previous owner of that particular number.


Update: One day later a Bell technician removed it. There's obviously some element of fraud here since Ms. Bonnell's address was never what it claimed to be!

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