I work for a small computer company in Michigan that services other companies that are not large enough to have thier own IT staff. I have been with this company for a couple of years now and throughout the years I have seen them do things that I considered to be unethical, although not to the scale of recent events. Recently we have changed the business model, bought into a managed care software (remote control, backup, antivirus, patching and more) and have installed this on our customers machines/servers for a monthly fee. Several times in the past couple of months, one or more of our customers has not paid for these monthly services. The management will attempt to contact them, get them to pay and sometimes fail to get the customers to pay. When this happens they remote into the network and start disabling network services to effectively disable the companies computer network to force the customer to call us to fix the issue. They will then send a tech onsite for the customer, but only after the customer pays the outstanding bill. When we arrive onsite, we will fix the issue for the customer, but will then charge the customer for that visit depending on the "level" of monthly services the customer bought.
This has happened several times where I was the primary tech onsite doing the repair work. The last time this occured was about two weeks ago. I feel like this is getting out of control and wanted your guys opinion on how I should handle this. What is my responsiblity regarding this issue? Do I contact the customers that have had this happen to them and inform them? Do I warn the other customers of the service? Is this illegal (they are basically holding these customers hostage) and should I turn my company in for doing so? I know it is unethical and I am already looking for other work, but I am almost ready to simply walk away from the company to distance myself from this issue. The only thing hold mee back is that I live in Michigan and tech jobs are next to impossible to find right now.
Visad
This has happened several times where I was the primary tech onsite doing the repair work. The last time this occured was about two weeks ago. I feel like this is getting out of control and wanted your guys opinion on how I should handle this. What is my responsiblity regarding this issue? Do I contact the customers that have had this happen to them and inform them? Do I warn the other customers of the service? Is this illegal (they are basically holding these customers hostage) and should I turn my company in for doing so? I know it is unethical and I am already looking for other work, but I am almost ready to simply walk away from the company to distance myself from this issue. The only thing hold mee back is that I live in Michigan and tech jobs are next to impossible to find right now.
Visad