Sunday, May 13, 2012

Good Copier Gone Bad!

A few weeks ago I came across an article on the web that was titled "TD Bank attorneys blame copier for ‘high risk’ error".

I thought I'd give it a read because after 33 years selling copiers,  and I've never seen a copier make a mistake, or not until I read this article.

Anyway seems TD Bank was being sued by a group of investors because TD Bank had loaned money to some dude in Texas that had perpetrated a Ponzi scheme.  One of the key pieces of evidence was a Bank form called a Customer Due Diligence Form or CDD.  This form would have been generated when the dude from Texas started banking with TD.

During the trial TD Bank had produced a form that had a black bar across the top of the page. The form with the black bar was used to question the witnesses in the case.  After the trial had concluded the attorney for the investors noticed that the same Customer Due Diligence Form had been used in another case, however that form was in color and there was a bright red bar across the top of the page and the words "High Risk" in white (knockout) letters.  The investors attorney wanted TD Bank to be penalized for the error. 

However TD Bank argued that the error was not material to the outcome of the case because the words "High Risk" was used in other parts of the CDD form.

TD also stated “The printing and copying process inadvertently blackened all of the words in all of the colored headers of the CDD, including not only the words "high risk," but also the other words in those headers. We sincerely regret this copying error,”  I'm claiming BS!


WTF?  If you copy the form and there is a black bar with white letters you will get a black bar with white letters, if there is a red bar with white letters you could get either a gray bar and white letters.  There is no way a a copier would copy the black bar and fill in the white letters with black toner! 

In a follow up statement TD Bank attorney replied with this "Schnapp argued in his response that Mandel wasn’t misled by the document and the “document was neither ‘doctored’ nor ‘sanitized,’ and there was no fraud on the court or the jury.” 

I'm not buying it copiers are pretty dumb, they will only do what you tell it to do, like copy two sided, make the copy lighter, darker, bigger or smaller. I know of only one feature in the copy mode that would turn the white letters to black and this would have to be selected by the operator.  Maybe they should have called in a copier expert right?  I know quite a few in Texas who could have handled this with ease.

So there was one more statement from the article. In a follow-up reply, Mandel said he and his staff failed to black out the words "High Risk" even after copying and re-copying the bank form several times.

Huh, err what?  If you failed to black out the words "High Risk" then the "High Risk" would have still been there.  Maybe they should have stated this "We were able to scan the document, edit the "High Risk" so that there was only a black bar, and then we printed the document with the black bar".  Naw... then they would have been in a deeper pile of crap.  

A Print4Pay Hotel Member responded with this "Yup, but it sounds like a reasonable thing to a judge who has never personally used a copier. Similar to "No, we CAN'T disable Internet Explorer, the whole OS runs on it!".

Maybe it was a case of Good Copier Gone Bad!

-=Good Selling=-



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