The Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands (TSJC) has considered appropriate the dismissal of the head of a branch of a clothing brand in La Laguna (Tenerife) who was the victim of a telephone scam in which a third person posed as his superior. and convinced him to transfer 1,450 euros from the company at a bitcoin ATM.
The scammer told him that the operation had to be carried out urgently because they had to send some protective equipment to the store with the excuse that the La Laguna City Council was going to carry out an inspection.
Thus, the convicted man was convinced to give his personal telephone number with the excuse that they had to leave the landline free because he was going to receive a call from the transporters and gave him instructions on how to make the transfer by providing him with QR codes via WhatsApp.
Once the payments were made, the worker realized that he had been the victim of fraud, so he informed his direct boss and filed a complaint with the National Police.
The company fired him in February 2022 and accuses him of failing to comply with procedures that prevent the use of store money for any purpose.
The owners of the store consider that he should have known that the money could only be deposited into a bank account or delivered in cash to a security company and remember that they had been warned of the existence of this telephone scam.
Thus, his bosses reproach him for not making sure that he was the victim of a scam so that he failed to comply with specific instructions “and caused the entity to suffer deception.”
In the first instance, the Labor Court of the capital of Tenerife sided with the worker and ruled that his dismissal was unfair, setting compensation of 13,000 euros or reinstatement, with processing salaries then being paid at a rate of 75 euros per day.
The chain appealed the ruling by maintaining that the man committed a “very serious” offense that resulted in the loss of 1,450 euros and blames him for the occasions on which he was warned of the existence of this type of telephone fraud for which which is attributed to him “an absolute lack of diligence.”
The managers indicate that it was enough for them to have contacted them to verify that no one authorized an operation, which they consider “totally inadmissible.”
The worker alleged that he was overworked during the Christmas holidays and that around forty messages arrived in his email inbox every day, as well as that the scam was not reported to the works council.
Finally, the TSJC annulled the initial ruling and agreed with the chain, describing the dismissal as appropriate and only maintaining from the initial ruling the payment of just over 1,000 euros in vacations and pending salaries.
