A T-Mobile employee in Pinellas County, Florida, has been arrested on suspision of stealing an explicit video from a customer’s phone and emailing it to himself. It would be an unfortunate surprise to the store’s owners, if it weren’t for the fact that the employee was found guilty of defrauding T-Mobile in a weirdly elaborate sales commission scheme just last year.
Roberto Sanchez-Ramos, a 25-year-old employee at the Pinellas Park T-Mobile store, was arrested last Friday on suspicion of stealing an explicit video off a customer’s phone and emailing it to himself.
The police report says that Sanchez-Ramos “accessed the victim’s cellular phone while working as a T-Mobile employee…the victim noticed that her email had been accessed and her sexually explicit video was sent to an email which is believed to be [Sanchez-Ramos]’s.”
This isn’t the first time Sanchez-Ramos has been arrested while working at a T-Mobile store. Last year, while working at a different T-Mobile store in Largo, Florida, he plead guilty to a felony fraud after he was discovered working a bizarrely complicated scheme to get extra commission:
The initial transactions — the fraudulent refunds — would already have been enough cause for suspicion, so it’s unclear why Sanchez-Ramos would then use the cash to buy accessories from T-Mobile, rather than just taking the cash for himself.
The one explanation that makes sense is that Sanchez-Ramos was lagging behind in sales and in danger of losing his job. As BGR previously reported, a high-pressure sales culture exists at some T-Mobile store, where employees are strongly encouraged to push extra accessories or devices on customers, or face termination.
The T-Mobile employees previously interviewed by BGR admitted to fraudulent sales practices to try and boost their numbers, including lying to customers or adding insurance to plans without permission.
Sanchez-Ramos clearly took fraudulent sales to a whole new level, but the fact that he felt it necessary to steal from T-Mobile to potentially boost his sales numbers says something about the culture of sales in the wireless industry.
T-Mobile declined to comment on the incident.
