Consumerist
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geek squad
$50k Porn-Pilfering Lawsuits Opens With Geek Squad Employee Confession
The Star Tribune reports a woman is suing Best Buy for $50,000 after the Best Buy/Geek Squad repair service stole her naked photos from her computer, shared them with other Geek Squad agents, and even copied them onto the hard drives of other customers (this is hardly the first time Geek Squad has been caught stealing porn from customer's computers). William E. Giffels admitted in a written statement that he copied Kaylee Hall's nude photos from her computer onto his personal flash drive. On this drive, he also kept the most up-to-date version of the Geek Squad diagnostic tools and told other agents to copy from it. Then other Geek Squad made CD copies of the drive and installed the tools, along with Kaylee's photos, onto other customers' computers in the Traverse City, Michigan area. Inside, Giffels's written confession... More » -
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geek squad
Best Buy Busts Middle-school Janitor For Having Child Porn
Best Buy's Geek Squad tech repair service helped bust a middle-school custodian for having child porn on his hard-drive. Fox9 reports:
Geek Squad employees viewed over 800 images contained in a folder titled XXXYOUNGS. The images featured young girls believed to be between the ages of 7 and 15. In some of the pictures the children were nude; in others, they were engaged in sexual acts with adult males.
You would think they could stop after the first couple or so. Pedophiles should die a thousand deaths, but no doubt police appreciate that some tech services are now performing warrantless searches of citizen's hard drives for them.Middle School Employee Charged with Child Pornography Possession [FOX9] (Thanks to Nick!)
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leaks
Best Buy Porn Thief Inquisitions Revealed
After reading "How Geek Squad Investigated Its Own Porn Thieves," another fired Geek Squad tech has chimed in to tell us how the internal witch hunt for porn thieves proceeded.
I had worked for Geek Squad for over a year, and Best Buy a year and a half before that and was recently let go. Back when they started scanning computers, they said they found downloaded music and movies on our machine and we were to send them the hard drives. So we boxed them up and sent them out.
More »A month or so later the interrogations happened. We all had our turn, and when it was mine, I walked into a room with the table pushed against the wall and two chairs in the middle of the room sitting two feet apart with nothing in between.
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crime
Man Gets 11 Years After Geek Squad Reports Child Porn On His Computer
A man got 135 months in jail and a $10,000 fine after Geek Squad reported the computer he brought in for servicing had child pornography on it.
Just to make sure there's no other child pornographers out there, Geek Squad will continue to scour the hard drives of its customers for salacious images and video, helping itself to whatever media it fancies as a sort of automatic gratuity for the vigilante services it provides to the community.
Geek Squad trip lands child porn "trafficker" in slammer for 10 years [ArsTechnica] (Thanks to Hassan!)
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leaks
Best Buy's Geek Squad Scours Stores In Person For Stolen Porn N' Stuff
In addition to having Best Buy Geeks Squad locations hook up store computers to headquarters to check for porn and music stolen from customer's computers, and pirated software, they're also sending "audit teams" to investigate hard-drives at the stores in-person, reports an insider.
Geek Squad has also enacted a new "Open and Honest" policy, encouraging Geeks to step forward and report on employees found violating customer's privacy and such, along with a special email address and phone number for anonymously reporting concerns. Furthermore, the use of personal flash drives has been strictly forbidden.
Says the tipster, "I'm guessing this is due to the recent outbreaks of Geek Squad privacy issues."
(Photo: Maulleigh)
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electronics
Best Buy Making All Service Departments Geek Squadified
If you love the great porn-stealing and privacy-invading services currently offered by Geek Squad's in-store and in-home tech support, have cheer: Best Buy is rebranding all its service departments into Geek Squads, according to an inside source. They're testing it out in the New York metro area in preparation for a possible nation-wide rollout.
Of the move, a former employee writes... More »
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confirmed
Best Buy Systemically Searching Geek Squad Precincts For Porn
Best Buy is scanning Geek Squad computers for signs of porn infestation, as part of their continuing witch hunt. According to reports from four different Geek Squad employees, an edict was issued from corporate requiring precincts to connect every computer in every precinct to Agent Johnny Utah. More » -
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rumors
Best Buy Fires Geek Squad Supervisor Following Negative Newspaper Articles About Porn Pilfering
Best Buy is on the offense, launching an internal witch hunt to unmask the "rogue employees" responsible for exposing Geek Squad's pervasive culture of porn pilfering. Their first victim is the Geek Squad supervisor of the Santa Clarita store, one of the only Best Buy locations whose former employees were quoted in recent articles, print as being a center for porn pilfering. More » -
rumors
Best Buy To Sue Geeks Who Spoke Out Against Porn Stealing?
Word on the street is that following negative stories in the LA Daily News, and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Best Buy interrogated employees at the Santa Clarita store where former Geek Squad agent and Consumerist reader Brett Haddock used to work, and could be gearing up, or at least, wants people to think it's gearing up, to seek damages against Geeks who spoke out about the porn pilfering.
Haddock wrote The Consumerist that BBY's threats posturing is, "an obvious attempt by a big corporation trying to scare the little guy. This may work to silence other agents, but it won't silence me, and they can't scare me for expressing my first amendment rights. I've done nothing but told the truth."
Hey Best Buy, guess what? The store where we got a video of your agent stealing porn? Yeah, it wasn't in Santa Clarita.
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media whoring
We're On CBS2 Los Angeles Tonight
Just did a phone interview with CBS2 in LA. Looks like they're picking up our Geek Squad sting operation story. The piece might air at 6, but it could be later, too. We know many of you are sick of hearing about it but there's a whole bunch of America that hasn't. A still image of monsieur Popken with a crackly phone conversation playing underneath shall be their reward. -
leaks
How Geek Squad Steals Your Porn
According to an insider, these are the tools, programs, and procedures one Geek Squad precinct exploits to snarf up your porn:
Generally, the process looks like this...for most customers, we use a commercial program called Nero BackItUp (available with Nero Ultra Suite) - we mount the HDD as a slave on our TechPC, and we just select the directories we need to backup, and the process automates itself. Unless somebody goes in and looks, or an occasional oddball case (I found child porn on a computer by the fact that CDFS limits the length of the name of a file, and if you put enough keywords in front of it, Nero wants to know how to deal with it) we don't see any the files. This is true for I'd say....60% of all backups we do.
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confessions
Geek Squad Hatched Plot To Harvest Porn From Pornstar Jasmine Grey's HardDrive, Days Before She Died In Car Crash
"I worked for Best Buy 285 several years ago (2003-2005) and was both a Blackshirt and an Agent once the Geek Squad rolled out.
At my store, searching and copying files was not a common practice at all. We were the good guys of the district. One day, however, a gorgeous woman walked in with her computer complaining of her PC locking up when she went to use her webcam. She refused to give us her website so we knew something was up. She authorized us to do a tune-up to remove unneeded files and update her to SP2. During the cleanup process, we saw that her Norton Protected Recycle Bin was consuming 12gigs of files. It was password protected...but she used the same password as her windows login (which users provide on one of the thousand forms they fill out when they drop the PC off).
Once we got into the recycle bin, we realized it was entirely filled with naked pictures and movies. It turns out that this young woman was a pornstar named Jasmine Grey (link safe for work)" More »
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leaks
2 More Former Employees Claim Geek Squad Stole Customers' Personal Files
Two more individuals identifying themselves as former Geek Squad employees have stepped forward with allegations about the repair company's employees unauthorized copying of personal information from customer's hard-drives. More » -
porn
Internet Reacts To Geek Squad Sting Op Video
Slate: "That can't be good for business."
Gizmodo: "For shame, Geek Squad! (You're not supposed to get caught!)"
Network World: "Who the heck steals porn? I mean any 12-year-old can find all anybody should want for free."
Wired Blogs: Gadget Lab: "...be careful where you shop for repairs."
BoingBoing: "By the time your PC needs repair, it will be too late to lock down. Plan ahead, grasshopper!"
Slashdot: "A related story from a former Geek Squad employee details the decline of the Geek Squad and Best Buy ethics in general."
PREVIOUSLY: VIDEO: Consumerist Catches Geek Squad Stealing Porn From Customer's Computer
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best buy
Geek Squad Company Forums React To Sting Op Video
A sampling of what they're saying on the Geek Squad internal message board about "Consumerist Catches Geek Squad Stealing Porn From Customer's Computer."
Francis West: "im so darn tired of his slander... SO WHAT CAN/ARE WE DOING ABOUT THIS?!?!?!"
Stephen Lopez2: "Plenty of people use porn as a screen saver, desktop background or store it on the desktop. i honestly never saw as much porn till i started working here. its kinda annoying."
Nate Hasty: "Do I believe that this sort of activity is occurring in Precincts all across the nation, and probably the world? Yep. That's why I say instead of piss and moan and cry about the fact that the Consumerist is "picking" on us, let's suck it up and remember that we are supposed to be the most trustworthy PC repair service in the nation, and aspire to be the most trusted in the world someday. But if Agents continue to act selfishly and with as much reckless abandon for the privacy of our clients as was displayed in this video, we will FAIL. "
Robert Miller: "I hate the consumerist, but if there were not problems they would have nothing to report on."
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investigations
Why We're Not Telling Geek Squad CEO Which Agent Stole The Porn
from ben@consumerist.com
to Robert Stephens
date Jul 5, 2007 12:49 PM
subject looking for comment re: VIDEO: Consumerist Catches Geek Squad Stealing Porn From Customer's ComputerHey Robert,
Just left you a message but we're getting ready to publish a video about how we found a Geek Squad agent taking images and video from a computer we took in for repairs and copying them to his thumbdrive. If you have a second, I'd love to get a comment.
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from Stephens, Robert (GeekSquad)"
to ben@consumerist.com
date Jul 5, 2007 2:29 PMBen,
If this is true, it's an isolated incident and grounds for termination of the Agent involved. I'll need the name of the Agent to launch an internal investigation immediately. Are you willing to provide this?
-Robert Stephens More »
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investigations
How To Make Your Computer Catch People Stealing Your Porn
Here's how we rigged our computer to make a video of itself and caught the Geek Squad stealing porn from it. More »
