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O2 Employees Fired For Selling iPhones On eBay

Note to retail employees everywhere: Using your employee discount to purchase merchandise at reduced cost and then selling it on eBay for a profit will likely upset your employer and jeopardize your job.

It appears that some O2 employees in the U.K. did not get that note. It also didn't happen to occur to them when they bought iPhones at a 20% staff discount and them sold them at a large mark up on eBay. According to Cellular-News, six staff were fired for the scam, and another 20 are under investigation. All the employees are based in the greater London area.

Commenting to a U.K. newspaper, one source said, "It is actually nothing new that staff in mobile phone shops have supplemented income with this abusive perk. The iPhone is an iconic product for O2 and it makes sense to start there, but I predict that we will see this spread across the sector. The days when this kind of scam could be ignored are over."

For the record, I am pretty sure some sort of employee practice such as this is what prevented me from scoring an iPhone from the local AT&T shop back on June 29, 2007. It's true that Apple kept most of the initial stock for itself, but the (very large) AT&T store near my home had only four iPhones for sale the first day. I firmly believe that's because the staff "took care of" the rest in one way, shape, or form. Not that I can substantiate that claim...

Either way, the O2 staffers found out the hard way what happens when you take advantage of perks.

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