dug 
Wow, when was the last time you thought you’d get a response as a result of filling in a form on the web (never mind a rapid response)?
Well, I had a little grief from the fraud protection mob at Firstdirect this afternoon and as a result posted this note in the feedback form on the Eat website (and I won’t go into the domain name resolution issue on the site which means if you load the flash movie by entering the domain without the ‘www’ the links to the feedback form are broken–I wonder how much more feedback they’d get if that was fixed…)
At 14:31:55 on 27 June 2008 (roughly an hour ago) I purchased a soup and sandwich from your 15 Basinghall Street shop. When I returned to my desk to eat my lunch I received a call from my bank (first direct) informing me that there had been fraudulent behaviour on my switch card. According to their records, the transaction I had just made in the City of London was routed through a supplier in Equador. The security guys at the bank where I work reckon this is a man-in-the-middle attack and that someone has tampered with the keypad in the store (similar to attaching card readers to ATM tellers, to harvest card details). Please review this situation asap. All the best,
Dug Falby
To be honest, I really didn’t think I’d get an answer (strangely, the Flash front-end is what gave me this impression: If it’s not a real html form, how can it yield real results?) but I did.
A nice man called Martin (I think he said he was head of business communications?) rung up to explain what was going on as a result of my note. From his description, I pictured a black helicopter appearing over Basinghall street and special forces whisking the card-reader off to a controlled explosion. It was very impressive, he said he’d frozen all card transactions at the store, notified the card processing supplier who are going to come in and refit the store tonight and would double-check records for staff access to card processing stuff.
He also made a point of checking that I had notified my bank and assured me he would get back to with with any progress relevant to my situation. Prompt, courteous and thorough, just the way it oughta be.
Which of course means I’ll be all the more likely to go buy delicious soups and salads from Eat:-)
