Getting around Koodo's (Canada) password reset bug - use incognito browser

Americans think Comcast customer service is bad.

It is true that Comcast is not great — though it is better than it was. Compared to Canada’s mobile carriers though, Comcast is bloody Apple.

My sister uses Koodo, a Telus subsidiary. She was unable to pay her bill for a couple of months, attempts to pay by credit card were met with a nonsensical error message. Customer support couldn’t help. Somehow I figured out their security system was balking on an address mismatch between her bank and her Koodo account — and producing a red herring error message. Of course changing her address on the web site didn’t suffice…

Eventually Koodo changed her address. Since her only computer is an iPhone, and since Koodo doesn’t have a mobile solution (but, you say, “they are a mobile service …”) I did the transaction online.

Or rather, I attempted the transaction online. Koodo wouldn’t recognize her password. They’re happy to do resets though, but the reset passwords wouldn’t work. Koodo wouldn’t let me reuse them though — it was storing the password hash correctly (or, knowing them, the password in plaintext).

I kept getting this message:

Something went wrong!

Sorry, the username and password you entered does not match our records. Please try again.

Warning: Five (5) unsuccessful attempts will cause your online access to be locked for one hour. If you can't remember your password, reset your password now before your account is locked.

The fix?

Well, I knew the username and passwords were correct, so I figured the real error was again unrelated to the error message. My bet was on some cookie state.

So I tried with a Chrome incognito window. That worked.

There’s no way Koodo tech support would have figured that out. What a hopeless company.

Take heart America. We may have the worst leader since Andrew Johnson, the greatest threat to civilization since Mao, but Canada has Koodo.

Ok, forget that. We’d rather have Koodo.