Olu Awoseyi remembers that sinking feeling after boarding a plane that he didn’t have his three-month-old, pricey Samsung phone.
Awoseyi, his wife and two children were returning from a vacation from Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. They had just taken their seats on the Toronto to Edmonton leg of their trip when he realized his phone was missing.
He got his wife to call the phone, only to be disappointed, “We didn’t hear vibrate or ring around me, so I knew I dropped it at the point of boarding.”
It was too close to take-off to go look for it. But when he returned home, he remembered he’d installed a security application called Bitdefender on the phone. The app was set up to snap a photo of anyone who tried to unlock the phone with the wrong PIN.
Sure enough, he found a photo taken approximately 90 minutes after he’d boarded his flight: It was an Air Canada employee staring back at him.
He studied the photo carefully, double-checking the colours of the person’s uniform. “At first I was kind of excited,” he told Go Public.
“I think I’m in good hands. If it’s an employee of Air Canada that found it, then I’m OK.”
That was Oct. 9. Over the next five weeks his optimism turned to anger and frustration as he repeatedly called and emailed Air Canada’s customer service and communicated with its online customer support chat service — to no avail.
He also tried to track the phone using Bitdefender and the Google Find My Device app. But the phone appeared to be switched off, so the trackers didn’t work.
Olu Awoseyi was optimistic the photo would help him get the phone back. Over the next five weeks his optimism turned to anger and frustration as Air Canada seemed unable to locate it. (Trevor Wilson/CBC)
On Nov. 9, an Air Canada agent said a Samsung phone had been turned in at the Pearson Airport’s lost and found. But Awoseyi had checked, and the lost and found service said they did not have his phone.
A little over a week later, Air Canada customer service wrote a conflicting email, saying the airline had identified and interviewed the employee in the photo.
WATCH | Missing phone, mystery employee:
Edmonton man battles Air Canada over lost cellphone | Go Public
20 hours ago
Duration 2:02
Edmonton’s Olu Awoseyi has spent months trying to get Air Canada to either retrieve or replace his expensive new cellphone. An airline employee found it and claims to have placed it in a lost and found, but it disappeared. Awoseyi says the airline has given him the runaround ever since.
It said, according to the employee and an eyewitness, the phone had been returned to the Air Canada customer service desk, in Pearson’s international area.
Despite this, the email went on to explain, the phone was nowhere to be found.
“We have conducted our own thorough search this morning at the airport’s Lost and Found, as well as at Air Canada’s Lost and Found,” it said, “but regrettably, we have not Located your phone.”
Awoseyi is still paying for the lost Samsung S23 Ultra phone that he bought as part of his mobile plan contract. (Samsung)
That Nov. 16 email was Air Canada customer support’s last communication with Awoseyi. Even the chat bot stopped replying to him.
In a statement to Go Public, Toronto Pearson Airport said it has “no written or video record” of the phone being dropped off at its lost and found.
Go Public asked the country’s two largest airlines and Canada’s busiest airports about their success rates reuniting customers with their lost items. The airports report thousands of lost items each year, especially electronics like phones and tablets.
Air Canada claimed a 92 per cent success rate last year. Pearson appears to have been in second place, behind Vancouver International Airport, saying it got more than half of its lost items back to their owners.
In a statement to Go Public, Air Canada denied responsibility for the lost phone “as it is a personal item. Regrettably, several efforts to locate the item…have been unsuccessful.”
With the case unresolved and the last documented sighting of the phone in the hands of an Air Canada employee, Awoseyi is left thinking the worst.
This is the photo and alert Awoseyi received from the Bitdefender app. (Bitdefender)
“Why try to unlock [the phone], when you don’t have a code for the phone? So that made me believe this was a case of a theft.”
Regardless of what happened, Weston Powell, a Toronto lawyer, says Air Canada likely had an obligation to take care of the phone.
“Finders keepers, losers weepers — that’s not an accurate summation of the law,” Powell said.
Toronto lawyer Weston Powell says Air Canada is likely liable for the lost phone. (Mark Bochsler/CBC)
“When someone comes into possession of someone else’s property and that person’s identification is known, they do have obligations to return that property.”
Powell says the person snapped in the photo holding the phone may have some explaining to do, “But beyond that, Air Canada would also owe obligations because they are vicariously liable for their employee’s actions.”
Chris Choi, a professor at the School of Hospitality, Food and Beverage Management at the University of Guelph, says Air Canada’s response is the sort of thing that erodes customers’ trust.
He says it’s not only the fact that the airline can’t account for the missing phone, but that its customer support has stopped communicating with Awoseyi altogether.
“Ignoring the customer like that seems like you’re trying to avoid fixing the problem,” Choi said. “This situation can harm the airline’s reputation for a long time.”
Awoseyi has since redoubled his efforts to hold Air Canada to account. He filed a complaint with the Peel Regional Police, the closest municipal police force to Pearson Airport and hired a lawyer, who in a Jan. 8 letter asked for compensation for his phone and legal fees.
That letter received no response until almost three weeks later — three days after Go Public’s initial inquiries about the case — from a lawyer in Air Canada’s department of Litigation and Management, Global Claims.
That lawyer asked for the same information Awoseyi had already communicated to the airline’s customer support channels multiple times, and promised to get back to him “as soon as possible.” As of Friday, Awoseyi has received no response.
For now, he says he’s still on the hook for about $2,000 left on the contract for his uninsured phone.
“I think it’s disappointing.” he said. “I would think an organization like Air Canada should have a zero tolerance for things like this.”
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TOKYO (AP) — Japanese technology group SoftBank swung back to profitability in the July-September quarter, boosted by positive results in its Vision Fund investments.
Tokyo-based SoftBank Group Corp. reported Tuesday a fiscal second quarter profit of nearly 1.18 trillion yen ($7.7 billion), compared with a 931 billion yen loss in the year-earlier period.
Quarterly sales edged up about 6% to nearly 1.77 trillion yen ($11.5 billion).
SoftBank credited income from royalties and licensing related to its holdings in Arm, a computer chip-designing company, whose business spans smartphones, data centers, networking equipment, automotive, consumer electronic devices, and AI applications.
The results were also helped by the absence of losses related to SoftBank’s investment in office-space sharing venture WeWork, which hit the previous fiscal year.
WeWork, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2023, emerged from Chapter 11 in June.
SoftBank has benefitted in recent months from rising share prices in some investment, such as U.S.-based e-commerce company Coupang, Chinese mobility provider DiDi Global and Bytedance, the Chinese developer of TikTok.
SoftBank’s financial results tend to swing wildly, partly because of its sprawling investment portfolio that includes search engine Yahoo, Chinese retailer Alibaba, and artificial intelligence company Nvidia.
SoftBank makes investments in a variety of companies that it groups together in a series of Vision Funds.
The company’s founder, Masayoshi Son, is a pioneer in technology investment in Japan. SoftBank Group does not give earnings forecasts.
Shopify Inc. executives brushed off concerns that incoming U.S. President Donald Trump will be a major detriment to many of the company’s merchants.
“There’s nothing in what we’ve heard from Trump, nor would there have been anything from (Democratic candidate) Kamala (Harris), which we think impacts the overall state of new business formation and entrepreneurship,” Shopify’s chief financial officer Jeff Hoffmeister told analysts on a call Tuesday.
“We still feel really good about all the merchants out there, all the entrepreneurs that want to start new businesses and that’s obviously not going to change with the administration.”
Hoffmeister’s comments come a week after Trump, a Republican businessman, trounced Harris in an election that will soon return him to the Oval Office.
On the campaign trail, he threatened to impose tariffs of 60 per cent on imports from China and roughly 10 per cent to 20 per cent on goods from all other countries.
If the president-elect makes good on the promise, many worry the cost of operating will soar for companies, including customers of Shopify, which sells e-commerce software to small businesses but also brands as big as Kylie Cosmetics and Victoria’s Secret.
These merchants may feel they have no choice but to pass on the increases to customers, perhaps sparking more inflation.
If Trump’s tariffs do come to fruition, Shopify’s president Harley Finkelstein pointed out China is “not a huge area” for Shopify.
However, “we can’t anticipate what every presidential administration is going to do,” he cautioned.
He likened the uncertainty facing the business community to the COVID-19 pandemic where Shopify had to help companies migrate online.
“Our job is no matter what comes the way of our merchants, we provide them with tools and service and support for them to navigate it really well,” he said.
Finkelstein was questioned about the forthcoming U.S. leadership change on a call meant to delve into Shopify’s latest earnings, which sent shares soaring 27 per cent to $158.63 shortly after Tuesday’s market open.
The Ottawa-based company, which keeps its books in U.S. dollars, reported US$828 million in net income for its third quarter, up from US$718 million in the same quarter last year, as its revenue rose 26 per cent.
Revenue for the period ended Sept. 30 totalled US$2.16 billion, up from US$1.71 billion a year earlier.
Subscription solutions revenue reached US$610 million, up from US$486 million in the same quarter last year.
Merchant solutions revenue amounted to US$1.55 billion, up from US$1.23 billion.
Shopify’s net income excluding the impact of equity investments totalled US$344 million for the quarter, up from US$173 million in the same quarter last year.
Daniel Chan, a TD Cowen analyst, said the results show Shopify has a leadership position in the e-commerce world and “a continued ability to gain market share.”
In its outlook for its fourth quarter of 2024, the company said it expects revenue to grow at a mid-to-high-twenties percentage rate on a year-over-year basis.
“Q4 guidance suggests Shopify will finish the year strong, with better-than-expected revenue growth and operating margin,” Chan pointed out in a note to investors.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 12, 2024.
TORONTO – RioCan Real Estate Investment Trust says it has cut almost 10 per cent of its staff as it deals with a slowdown in the condo market and overall pushes for greater efficiency.
The company says the cuts, which amount to around 60 employees based on its last annual filing, will mean about $9 million in restructuring charges and should translate to about $8 million in annualized cash savings.
The job cuts come as RioCan and others scale back condo development plans as the market softens, but chief executive Jonathan Gitlin says the reductions were from a companywide efficiency effort.
RioCan says it doesn’t plan to start any new construction of mixed-use properties this year and well into 2025 as it adjusts to the shifting market demand.
The company reported a net income of $96.9 million in the third quarter, up from a loss of $73.5 million last year, as it saw a $159 million boost from a favourable change in the fair value of investment properties.
RioCan reported what it says is a record-breaking 97.8 per cent occupancy rate in the quarter including retail committed occupancy of 98.6 per cent.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 12, 2024.
