The Mobile Outlet: any good? (merged)

daniellelandod

blaster99999 wrote:

when i served court action against mobile rainbow 4 weeks ago for not paying my 2nd claim for 2 contracts i submitted breech of contract and claim the rest of my 2 claims total £440 +£50 court fee's and they paid up the lot within 7 days.

I'm glad to hear you were successful. Please can you tell me how I go about doing this? How do I begin court proceedings?

The_Mobile_Outlet

Hi,

If you feel your application was dealt with incorrectly, please email forumqueries@themobileoutlet.co.uk and we will review your application. Please include your full name and complete address.

Regards
Forum Query Team

daniellelandod

The_Mobile_Outlet wrote:

Hi,

If you feel your application was dealt with incorrectly, please email forumqueries@themobileoutlet.co.uk and we will review your application. Please include your full name and complete address.

Regards
Forum Query Team

I have done, but how long should I wait. I emailed cashback@themobileoutlet.co.uk many times over the past 4 months and keep getting told the same thing...'we're dealing with your claim'. I emailed forumqueries@themobileoutlet.co.uk last week and although you said you're dealing with my claim, I've heard that many times and have then just been ignored. I'm going to file a claim with Her Majesty's Court Service if I don't hear anything by Monday. Martinefjohnson@hotmail.com

Alec2006

Dear The Mobile Outlet

I have a CCJ against you, entered on 1st February, as you failed to defend a claim I made for non-payment of cashback.
Will you please state when you are going to comply with the court order, or do you wait until I take an enforcement action against you?

Yours faithfully

Not a happy customer

SwiftEdge

After reading about so many problems people have had in obtaining their cashback I had was quite worried that I might also run into difficulties.

However, I sent off my claim (first four months statements, the dispatch note and a letter requesting cashback) to

Mobile Outlet
Suite 3-4
3/4 Riverdale House
Dockfield Road
Shipley
BD17 7AD

under recorded delivery.
The Mobile Outlet sent me an email on the 15th of January saying they had received my claim and were processing the cashback. Then today, the 10th of February, I received a cheque for the first four months of the contract.

So although many people here are having problems, don't lose hope, as they do stick to the contract for some.


Only one thing that I am not sure about. The cheque was for £72 however contract payments add to £70.12 without VAT and £82.39 with VAT. Am I missing something on the contract, is this how much they agreed to pay?

blaster99999

daniellelandod wrote:

I'm glad to hear you were successful. Please can you tell me how I go about doing this? How do I begin court proceedings?

https://www.moneyclaim.gov.uk/csmco/session_timeout.jsp

just register here and start your court action against them, i did against mobile rainbow and they paid up instantly, looks like mobile outlet are not has easy you may have to enforce your action, just go all the way as long has you have all your copies of documents sent and proof of them recieving and you have copy of there T&C's and you followed everything spot on take em to court.

nilocmac

SwiftEdge wrote:

After reading about so many problems people have had in obtaining their cashback I had was quite worried that I might also run into difficulties.

However, I sent off my claim (first four months statements, the dispatch note and a letter requesting cashback) to

Mobile Outlet
Suite 3-4
3/4 Riverdale House
Dockfield Road
Shipley
BD17 7AD

under recorded delivery.
The Mobile Outlet sent me an email on the 15th of January saying they had received my claim and were processing the cashback. Then today, the 10th of February, I received a cheque for the first four months of the contract.

So although many people here are having problems, don't lose hope, as they do stick to the contract for some.


Only one thing that I am not sure about. The cheque was for £72 however contract payments add to £70.12 without VAT and £82.39 with VAT. Am I missing something on the contract, is this how much they agreed to pay?

Just wondering when you sent your claim (have done the same as you except sent mund Priority Service) as I sent one a few days ago? How long after you sent your claim did you get that email?

In regards to the £72 would it be a 5th of your contract cost as I think they do the refunds in equal amounts?

Cobra_3

blaster99999 wrote:

https://www.moneyclaim.gov.uk/csmco/session_timeout.jsp

just register here and start your court action against them, i did against mobile rainbow and they paid up instantly, looks like mobile outlet are not has easy you may have to enforce your action, just go all the way as long has you have all your copies of documents sent and proof of them recieving and you have copy of there T&C's and you followed everything spot on take em to court.

Absolutely, Blaster. I agree with you entirely.

If only more people would DO this instead of clogging up this thread with endless whingeing "Open Letter"s to The Mobile Outlet that all say the same thing and achieve absolutely nothing.

What does strike me, though, wading through all 37 pages of it, is that throughout this entire thread everybody just seems to assume that The Mobile Outlet is being inefficient or rapacious. Does nobody ever ask themselves whether or not the reason a lot of cashbacks are not being paid is because the company involved simply does not have enough funds every month to cover its cashback liabilities?

Certainly, to me, this company is exhibiting all the classic symptoms of being completely strapped for cash and living hand-to-mouth.

What is happening here is entirely consistent with what you would expect to see when a retailer, in a highly competitive market, under-prices its deals too aggressively in order to attract custom - TMO's prices are invariably the cheapest listed on comparison sites - and at the same time underestimates the number of people who will then file their cashback claims correctly. At the end of each month, they cannot fund all the cashbacks for which they are liable until some more money comes in.

Faced with this, the retailer has four alternatives:

1. Pay them all and go bust when the cheques hit its bank.

2. Call in receivers.

3. Reject a sufficient number of claims, on spurious grounds, to enable itself to pay the other claims without going bust, hoping that those it refuses will simply give up and go away.

4. Wait until the commissions from new sales come in and then use those to pay the cashbacks it owes on past deals. (That practice, of course, is a recipe for disaster. It is unsustainable and, like any pyramid scheme, can only end in the whole thing collapsing).

Now, let me make it absolutely clear that I have no idea what state The Mobile Outlet’s finances are actually in, nor am I accusing it of fraudulent practice. I have no evidence upon which to take an informed view either way: only their auditors can do that. I am merely making observations that are of universal application.

If, however, The Mobile Outlet (or any other retailer’s) finances should indeed become this parlous, and they then, in addition, have to start paying court costs and entire year's cashbacks early (because people are successfully getting the Small Claims Court to award them this at the first stage of what the retailer had envisaged would be a protracted, 5-stage process) any actual business plan that the retailer may ever have had will go straight out of the window, the trend will accelerate, they will lose money on every transaction, and collapse becomes inevitable.

And when that happens, nobody (except the receivers) then gets any money at all.

It is thus essential to proceed promptly through the Small Claims Court for all cashbacks owed as soon they become overdue, in the hope of thereby extracting them from the company before it goes bust and all its assets are frozen.

Those left out in the cold are those who failed to take enforcement action and simply swallowed all the delays and excuses with which they have been fobbed off.

To my mind there is only one way to deal with ANY company that behaves in an unacceptable manner in regard to paying cashbacks. Comply exactly with the Terms & Conditions of the contract, keep copies of every document involved, avoid conversing with them on the telephone unless you record every conversation and then be as intransigent with them as they would be with you if you failed to comply with the Terms & Conditions to the letter.

Frankly it amazes me to read of so many people here who send countless emails and letters to rogue dealers, spend hours trying to call them on 0870 numbers and then just accept endless lame excuses for not being sent their money.

Such behaviour only projects to the retailer involved a degree of weakness that he is then likely to exploit.

If you are owed money by such an outfit, what on earth are you doing sending them begging letters for it?

When such a retailer defaults on paying (within a timescale, let us not forget, that the retailer itself chose to specify in its own Terms & Conditions) cashbacks that are owed to you, you need to ask yourself how they would treat YOU if you had failed, by one document or one day, to comply with those same Terms & Conditions.

As soon as The Mobile Outlet or any other retailer defaults on their cashback payment within the allotted timescale specified in their Terms & Conditions, you need to send them a Letter Before Action stating that unless they pay you by a certain specific date (fairly soon) you will proceed against them through the Small Claims Court.

And then DO it; sending in bailiffs, if necessary, to extract from them the money you are owed. All the costs of this are added to your claim; you get it back and they have to pay it.

Unless you do this, YOU will be the one left whistling for your money when the company collapses because other people did.

You also have a moral obligation - as I am sure MoneySavingExpert would agree - to file formal complaint about such a company to its local Trading Standards Office, so that its officers are alerted to the fact at a rogue trader is operating on its patch, and to write to the chief executive of the network that subsidised your phone (and to whom you are paying line rental) asking them to cease trading with the retailer until it has cleared its backlog of outstanding cashback claims.

Only by taking such resolute action can we protect both ourselves and other people from being exploited and ripped-off.

Seetha_A

Can someone tell me if I have the right to cancel my direct debit to Orange, the network service provider, as a consequence of my ongoing dispute re cashback with The Mobile Phone Outlet, or do I have to continue paying my monthly fee upfront (with no sight of cashback!).

And also, thank you Cobra for the long but succinct message regarding legal proceedings. Where can I find a 'Letter Before Action' or is this just the name given to a letter stating what I am about to do?

SwiftEdge

nilocmac wrote:

Just wondering when you sent your claim (have done the same as you except sent mund Priority Service) as I sent one a few days ago? How long after you sent your claim did you get that email?

In regards to the £72 would it be a 5th of your contract cost as I think they do the refunds in equal amounts?

I believe I sent it around the 4th or 5th of January (perhaps a bit later). So it was around 10 days before I got the email.

Ah, the money makes sense like that. Thanks