A Best Buy customer in North Carolina is obviously not a regular reader of Consumerist. Otherwise, he probably would not have believed the Geek Squad geeks when they promised to delete all his personal info and data from the tablet he returned to Best Buy earlier this year.

Earlier this week, several months after bringing his Motorola Zoom tablet back to his local Best Buy, the man received an e-mail from another dude in Oklahoma who had purchased the refurbed device on Woot.com, only to find some free bonus content.

“All his family pictures, his email, and it was logged into his Facebook account,” the buyer says.

When the original customer contacted Best Buy, he was reassured that the store did nothing wrong.

“He assured me that nothing like this could happen at all,” he tells WGHP-TV. “They have a four-stage process in how they handle this to delete everything and make sure this doesn’t happen. But it did.”

Wisely, the North Carolina customer has now changed all his passwords and account numbers.

“I had to change everything,” he says. “My whole life was on there. Imagine, if in the wrong hands, what somebody could do with that.”

The Oklahoma man who purchased the tablet from Woot says claims that Best Buy offered him a new tablet and a $200 gift card — if he can return the offending tablet to the original store. Instead, he’s working with the North Carolina fella to get the tablet back to him and his lawyer.

“I know it’s not necessarily company policy to admit fault and make apologies,” said Mr. Oklahoma (not his actual name; but a pretty cool name nonetheless), “but there’s still something they could have done than just dismissing his concern and then trying to call me and try and get the device back.”

Meanwhile, the guy whose personal info has apparently been floating around on an old tablet for several months says he went to the press so that others can learn from his story.

“Every day people bring back laptops, CPUs and cell phones and tablets, and we trust these companies to delete this information,” he tells WGHP.

 

Man’s Personal Information Left on Returned Tablet for Months [myFox8.com]

Thanks to Al for the tip!

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