20,000 listings for Fujitsu and Fujitsu Siemens on eBay UK? Get rid of them.

[pillarboxred]

Why is eBay still listing FUJITSU?

[*vyolla*]

Because there's no sudden blanket ban on every item with the word Fujitsu in the title?

The brand hasn't been sanctioned, and most items will be second hand ones being listed by sellers, not Fujitsu themselves anyway.

[*knight-rider*]

i`m not so sure that`s the right way to go anyway, that just makes people suffer who work there but weren`t apart of anything that went on within the Horizon situation. Like one of the guys said in the drama, `hit them in their pockets`, that`s what would benefit the sub-postmasters more 🙂

One thing that has always bothered me when all this started and certainly didn`t seem to be raised within the drama, is the fact that before Horizon, Royal Mail probably didn`t have a single, or certainly a rare instance of a sub-postmaster fiddling the books, so it astonishes me that nobody, certainly at the top or within government, didn`t turn round and say `we have had no problems with these post-masters in years or rarely, now 550 have turned into theives overnight, something clearly isn`t right here`. So, they either didn`t say it, but should have, or it was said and they just didn`t care!

Brilliant drama series, but what a scandal, disgraceful, plain and simple.

[papso22]

What a ridiculous post!

It was the software at fault in the P.O. scandal not the hardware.  

[iew-signed-books]

Why not? It's a free world (to some extent).

[vinylscot]

I think the answer to your question is that they took the high number of "apparent frauds" as evidence that there had always been this widespread problem, and it wasn't being picked up under their old procedures. This new software would detect it better, and wipe out the problem.

[bravergrace]

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@*knight-rider* wrote:

One thing that has always bothered me when all this started and certainly didn`t seem to be raised within the drama, is the fact that before Horizon, Royal Mail probably didn`t have a single, or certainly a rare instance of a sub-postmaster fiddling the books,

---

This is simply untrue on several levels - apart from the confusion between Royal Mail and the Post Office.

Of course there were prosecutions for sub-postmasters fiddling the books.  Any organisation that handles money in more than 10000 small shops, will experience mismanagement, fraud and theft from time to time.   In the old days, when most transactions and most fraud was in cash, this was hard to prove, and hard to know the scale of it.

Then, with the decline of cash, and the introduction of cash machines for withdrawals and paying in cash, several possible avenues of fraud and muddle were reduced.   

Blind faith in the new computer system led the Post Office to assume that postmasters were fiddling - and had always been.  The different procedures for balancing the books - paying "overs" into a suspense account, and treating all "shortages" as fraud, meant that accountants/auditors got the false impression that all the discrepancies were shortages - which often is a sign of fraud.

And altering figures within the system, without telling anyone, meant that a postmaster couldn't pinpoint a problem and balance the books, because the numbers would change, and the postmaster would doubt their own competence.

[kath3735_wxmjn]

to be honest it was really the top management, they knew there was a problem and covered it!

[pillarboxred]

After I posted, I did think that used, secondhand Fujitsu technology should be able to be sold as banning it would be unfair to innocent third parties and using "used" technology is "green", "sustainable" and "recycling". I can't believe that anyone will want to buy new Fujitsu tech.

How secure is Fujitsu tech if the company has geeks at headquarters fishing around in users supposedly secure machines?  It now looks like a hopelessly broken Brand.

[*vyolla*]

It's not a broken brand, it received over £6 billion in other contracts from us and it's still the world's sixth largest IT services provider by annual revenue, and the largest in Japan.

They don't just make software for Post Offices. 

The Horizon software clearly had issues, but the million dollar question is did Fujitsu test it and find that there were potential issues and still went ahead with distribution, or was it the postmasters who were informed and ignored all the red flags, or was it the Post Office who decided that it was human error.  It's a case of who knew about it and chose to ignore it (personally I'd like to see some prison sentences being dished out at some future point).

If Fujitsu were informed about their software errors at any point by the Post Office then the ball is in their court and they should be paying for the cover up.

If however, the Post Office kept it to themselves (I can't help help but think that they most likely did given that they put people in prison and this went on for years and years, given the scale it would be hard to announce that it was their software at fault and that they'd been ignoring the reports of hundreds of their sub post masters).

Until there's been an investigation and it's clear who knew what and when they knew it, the angry mob with torches idea should ideally be shelved. 

[pillarboxred]

Yes, but we can punish the company by not trading in their produce. By all means recycle-reuse their old technology.

[pillarboxred]

Fujitsu seems to have been "art and part" in whatever it was the Post Office was doing. How can you tell the dancer from the dance? Was it a glitchy machine or a glitchy programme, both Fujitsu products?

[*vyolla*]

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@pillarboxred wrote:

Yes, but we can punish the company by not trading in their produce.

---

Can you provide the link to the government report in which it's been confirmed that Fujitstu were aware, at any point since its inception, that the Horizon system was faulty resulting in the numbers being wildly out?

Until there's been an investigation and this has been confirmed, it's customary to refrain from calling for punishment. Innocent til proven guilty and all that. This is how mistakes are made, surely you can see the irony here?

[pillarboxred]

Yes, in a free world, consumers can make informed choices and avoid products made by reprehensible companies. 

[pillarboxred]

So what you are saying is large companies can't be punished and put out of business by consumer boycotts because the employees will lose their jobs. Employess lose their jobs all the time through company actions and Fujitsu's commercial space would easily be filled by competitors picking up the real estate, manufacturing capital, patents, workforce and customers.

[pillarboxred]

There always will be errors like giving  wrong change or if a £10 payment is made with two plastic notes stuck together as they so often are and the mistake is not noticed or the folded note trick or the foreign coin lookalike but those cheats or errors would be trifling and that is why small errors were made up from the postmasters' own pockets. In the "Mr Bates" scandal the amounts were large yet the postmasters were not going on three cruises a year and driving Lamborghinis while wearing Barbie pink outfits.

[pillarboxred]

EBay's user base can sanction Fujitsu by avoiding their products.

[*vyolla*]

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@pillarboxred wrote:

EBay's user base can sanction Fujitsu by avoiding their products.

---

Tell me why they should do that.

[derpybay]

I mean they could, or they could not be reactionary idiots.

[the_book_seekers]

Can you provide the link to the government report in which it's been confirmed that Fujitstu were aware, at any point since its inception, that the Horizon system was faulty resulting in the numbers being wildly out?

Depends on what you read. The Fujitstu boards deny being made aware of the problems, yet the reporting of what took place includes mentions of Fujitstu staff being able to remotely alter the figures in the Horizon system. Something the Post Office flatly denied was possible and which was central to its case. 

The Panorama programme on the scandal back in 2015 had a Fujitstu whistleblower. I think it is safe to say that the problems were known at Fujitstu. The question is how high did this knowledge go. The on going enquiry may establish who knew what, when and what did they do about it.