Sunday 6 February 2022

The Voice - Consumer's Voice

He cheated me!

I hope you will be of great help to me. I am a fourth year student at XXX. So last year I paid a certain guy to help me with an assignment as it's his business. He specified that if he has done an assignment for you and you get less than the pass mark he refunds 50% of your money. Now today he ain't responding me with regards to the refund but he is very much active on Whatsapp but zero reply on my messages.

I realise that it was very wrong for me, just that I wanted to save the semester but unfortunately ended up getting lower marks.


I'm sorry, I'm not going to be a great help to you. Perhaps the only thing I'm prepared to do for you is not disclose the name of the establishment where you're studying. I'm also not going to tell them what you've done. I'm also not going to call the Police.

Forgive me for being very clear in my language. You paid someone to help you cheat on your assignment and then you're angry that the person you paid to help you cheat then cheated you?

I don't know your educational establishment well but I'm prepared to bet they have a very strict policy on student conduct in general and plagiarism in particular. I suspect they might even have a zero-tolerance policy which means anyone discovered cheating like this will immediately be shown the door.

I think the very best thing you can do is learn from this experience that cheating is unacceptable and that the sort of people who will take your money to help you cheat are also cheats and can't be trusted.

Can I recover my data?

I need advice,help. My two phones were stolen and I went to Mascom and Orange service providers at Rail Park Mall asking for any possibilities of infrmation retrival on my simcards because I have lost all my important information (contacts, business information, etc) and ask for information retrieval. I was told I need a court order to get the information even though I am their clients. But for replacing simcards i just did an affidavit.

Kindly advice the procedure to get my information because my life have come to stop with that information business as a consultant have stopped.


I'm sorry but I don't think I have any good news for you.

My understanding is that network service providers like Orange and Mascom record and store information such as your call history, your location and your billing history. They need all of those things to allow you to connect and make calls and then pay their bills and manage your airtime. However, my understanding is that they don't keep copies of the personal information on your SIM cards like your contacts. I suspect that your contacts might be lost.

If I'm wrong perhaps any experts can get in touch and correct me?

I think the issue of the court order relates to something different. If a phone is lost and you want to track it and you're not already using the built-in tracking tools that come with many phones, only the Police are entitled to do this or to instruct a service provider to do so. For understandable privacy reasons, network providers don't let anyone track a phone without a good legal reason to do so. Do we really want angry former partners, business rivals and crooks being able to track our phones?

I know it's too late for you, but the lesson is to either make backups of your contacts or to use online and Cloud-based solutions to synchronise your contacts and the other critical information on your phone. I'm an iPhone user and this comes as standard and free with any iPhone. My understanding is that Android phones offer the same and I suspect almost all manufacturers offer some sort of backup tool.

And just so you know, the issue of data privacy is going to get a lot stricter in 2022 now that the Data Protection Act will be fully in force. Make sure you join the Consumer Watchdog Facebook group to learn more.

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