Having one of your online accounts hacked is like having a reality show on Bravo — it’ll happen to all of us at some point. Given how commonplace hacks are, you might assume that multibillion-dollar online operations would have a process in place for dealing with compromised accounts. You’d be mistaken.
Consumerist reader Alan says he recently received the runaround from online food delivery giant Grubhub after he noticed that his account may have been the target of hackers.
Alan says he first noticed an issue with the account when he received an email notifying him that Grubhub had changed his email address. The notice showed that the email, while it had the same handle, had been switched to Gmail from his actual email provider.
The notice instructed Alan to contact the company as soon as possible if he hadn’t made the change.
While Alan says he was skeptical that the email was some kind of phishing scam, his research didn’t find any glaring problems. So, he wrote an email to the company’s help address notifying them that he hadn’t changed his password.
A rep with the company wrote back, telling Alan that his email address had not been changed and records showed his original email was still on file.
Alan says he thought everything was fine, but four days later he was unable to log in to his Grubhub account.
After being unable to reset his password, Alan initiated an online chat on April 13 with a Grubhub customer service rep, who assured Alan she could manually send him a password reset email. The chat began at 7:46 p.m. and when it ended at 8:22 p.m., Alan still hadn’t received the email.
Several days later on April 21, Alan reached out to Grubhub by email, once again outlining his issue and asking to have the account either fixed or deleted.
In an emailed response, a rep for Grubhub apologized for the issue, but said there was nothing that could be done.
“Wow, I am so sorry to hear this – you must be so frustrated! I spoke with IT, and, unfortunately, there is nothing they can do, at this point,” the email stated. “I know this is an inconvenience, but, it would be best to register a new account and begin again. When you place your first order, write it to us, and we will be happy to send you some Free Grub for all of the problems you have experienced – my heart truly goes out to you!”
This was not acceptable, Alan says.
“This struck me as a bit odd, since it’s ignoring the fact that my credit card information and personal details have been compromised… and they won’t even let me access my account to delete that information, nor seemingly will they,” he tells Consumerist.
Another email from Grubhub was more of the same: The rep had contacted IT, but there was nothing they could do. Creating a new account was the only option.
At this point, Alan has given up his Grubhub account and moved on to another delivery service. While he says that his credit card doesn’t seem to have any mystery charges — yet, he’d still like to know why the company won’t delete the account.
Consumerist reached out to Grubhub about their policies for deleting or recovering accounts.
“Security is of the utmost importance to us at Grubhub, and we are committed to protecting the privacy of our users,” a rep told Consumerist.
The rep noted that the company is dedicated to taking action to reclaim any suspected compromised accounts. If a customer believes their account has been compromised, Grubhub will block the account from ordering as a security precaution.
“We apologize for your reader’s experience with our representatives, and it will not be taken lightly; it’s not indicative of the service that we pride ourselves in providing to our customers,” the rep said.
Grubhub passed along additional contacts for Alan to reach out to in order to resolve his situation. We’ll update this post when we hear back from Alan.
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