After many discussions and investigations with informed people, we learn that Apple have been the victim of frauds by various approved maintenance Centres. This is one of the reasons that caused the hardening of the conditions and the assumption of responsibility by Apple, and in particular, the creation of many software which decides, instead of a technician, if a machine can be repaired under guarantee or not. A reader, who worked for some time in a maintenance center made a point of informing us (under cover of anonymity) about these practices.
Each machine placed in the after-sales service is input to a database of Apple (gsx.apple.com). That makes it possible to check if it is under guarantee or not.
From the serial number the technician has access to the pdf for disassembling and has all the spare parts available.
The strange part is that the number of the parts are not recorded at Apple. Thus if you want a mother card of portable where your customer (or you) is not under guarantee… then one simply tests the following serial number, provided that it is the same machine, and often the serial numbers of following are found to be good…
Thus, certain After-Sales Service Centres could pass under guarantee of repairs, machine that were not covered, and also invoiced these repairs to the customer thus ensuring a healthy profit to them. Here is the continuation of this information. It relates to only partially this problem of this fraud.
The After-Sales centres are remunerated according to 5 tariffs according to the difficulties of mounting the part, from 5 euros for an exchange of a case of an iPod to 80 euros for a mother card of portable. On top there is a coefficient applied to each center that is the result of its performances. From memory the coefficient went from 0,5 to 1,5 times the basic amount. The performance is mainly calculated on the number of part used by repair (if you change more than one part then this implies that you are bad). Thus many customer had to wait 30 days, the time between closing a service dossier and to reopen a new dossier!!! At the time the productivity counted, the majority of the diagnoses were made without disassembling (thus one ordered a part on another serial number if one has prepared the ground, 2 parts, 2 serial number = 2 remunerations).
We know that this type of practice is now much more difficult since Apple has became aware of it and fights against it with frightening effectiveness. However these frauds would have cost them fortunes in the meanwhile.
