• The Hartford Courant, Wednesday, March 7, 2007 11:45 AM

About 300 former and present Best Buy employees and customers say the store's intranet Web site was different than what customers saw on the public Internet. As a result, the Connecticut state attorney general has started an investigation to determine if the duplicate sites were being used to cheat customers.

E-mails, messages and telephone calls from places such as Florida, California, Illinois, Rhode Island, New York, Virginia and even from Best Buy's headquarters in Minneapolis indicate that the problem for the 128,000-employee retailer extends way beyond Connecticut.

For example, Al--a former Best Buy supervisor who worked in an upstate New York store--says that customers would tell him about a special sale they saw on BestBuy.com. Al would then check his computer, but could not find any discount on the items. He would turn away the customers, telling them that the sale must be over, or that they had misread something.

State Attorney General Richard Blumenthal says he has had to send a second request to Best Buy for information about its policies because the company's first response raised more questions than it answered. In an e-mail, a Best Buy spokeswoman says that "it is not--and never has been--our intent to mislead" customers.

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