So your lucrative, big-ass casino company is costing headaches — and money — for a Chicago tax preparer because of a single-digit difference between your toll-free number and his. Which means he has to waste time fielding calls from thick-fingered (and, in some cases, thick-headed) patrons.
So, if it’s true that Mr. Refund “sometimes pretended to be an Ameristar employee, answering the phone as ‘Mr. Ameristar,’ pretending to take hotel reservations, asking customers for personal information and credit card numbers or telling callers that Ameristar hotels had burned down,” one can’t entirely blame him. (I’ve had the same phone number for over nine years and still get wrong-number calls, over and over.)
Anyway, what does Ameristar Casinos do but sue the poor S.O.B. to wrest his 1-866 number away from him? Ridiculous! Besides, had Ameristar accepted the solution that Mr. Refund says he offered the company, it would have cost Ameristar far less than the contentious route it’s taken.
This is easily Ameristar’s dumbest move since it opened the short-lived Reserve (now Fiesta Henderson) 10 years ago.
