A Sacramento-based woman, Tara Fitzgerald, is threatening to sue Dell as she says that a tech support engineer in Mumbai, Riyaz Shaikh, downloaded naked pictures of her during a tech-help call when she gave the Indian techie permission to access her Dell laptop remotely.
Barely a month after the call, Fitzgerald said 16 nude photographs of her pinched from her laptop appeared on a lurid website christened Bitchtara.
“I’ve been violated. My life’s been violated,” Fitzgerald, a mother of a 14-year-old girl, told ABC News 10.
The sordid saga began when Fitzgerald dialled Dell’s tech support number in December 2008 because she couldn’t find a bunch of nude pictures of herself she thought she had saved on her desktop to send to her boyfriend.
When she called Dell asking for help in retrieving the pictures, she was patched to its outsourced call centre in Mumbai run by Sitel India.
After the pictures were splashed across the web, a furious Fitzgerald contacted Shaikh, but he glibly convinced her that her boyfriend was the culprit. He then offered to help her black out the offensive website and asked her to ship him a brand new Dell laptop so that he could get cracking on the job from his home in Mumbai.
“I’m telling myself, my conscience is talking to me saying, ‘Tara, don’t send this. What are you doing? Are you crazy?’ I sent it anyways because I really believed in this guy,” said Fitzgerald.
Fitzgerald’s litany of woes doesn’t end here — the Mumbai trickster then allegedly used her Dell Preferred credit card to send a $800 Valentine’s Day gift to a Tennessee woman he chatted up on company time. One wonders how so much nonsense could fly on Dell’s watch given the fact that most customer calls are recorded.
“When you trust somebody with your computer, and you expect them to respect your privacy and they don’t, and they try to manipulate and control you, you feel like an idiot,” Fitzgerald told the US network.
She says her attempts to galvanize Dell and the Sacramento police were ineffective until she spoke to News 10. As soon as the US media got hold of the story, Dell contacted the vendor about Fitzgerald’s allegation.
Dell said this week that it can confirm that the tech-help rep no longer handles Dell calls. Fitzgerald, meanwhile, says she has contacted an attorney and is considering legal action against Dell.
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