Stolen Mobile Abroad - Now have a bill for £1120 - Advice Needed

christhompson

Really need some advice...

While on holiday in tenerife I had my phone stolen from my room, i had it in top drawer all holiday so I only realised it was stolen when i came to pack on the last day.

When i got home i rang 02 to block the sim, only to find I have a bill of £1120, all to spanish numbers, they have literaly abused it for fun! :mad:

I have no phone insurance and on reading the small print of my travel insurance, they dont cover mobile phones, never mind the costs of the calls.

I have spoken to 02 and so far they have been quite sympathetic and instructed me to wirte to their complaints department to see if anything could be done.

I just want advice from anyone who has experianced this?

My argument with 02 is that once the bill had reached £500 in 2 days! why they didnt put a stop on the account?

Any help gladly appreciated!

Jon_01

Your T& C's will tell you that you're liable for all calls made until you call the network and report it lost/stolen.
They don't know how you're going to be using the phone when your away, you might have had an emergency and needed to call back to the UK (or somewhere else). You wouldn't have been very happy in that case if they'd cut you off ! Also the networks have never policed accounts, they don't have enough staff to do that.
And finally, roaming calls don't log in real time with your home network. The info is sent to them by the roaming network in Tap files and they can be up to 48 hours behind your usage, so O2 wouldn't have known any way.

Sorry that's not a lot of use. . .

Leopard

Unless you were below the age of 18 when you entered into your contract with 02 you are legally obliged to pay this bill and they will pursue you for it (with court costs and interest fees) if you don't. They would also trash your credit rating.

You are regarded as having been negligent in not keeping the 'phone secure. It's not as if you were violently mugged and woke up several days later in hospital.

The best you can hope for, realistically, is that O2 will be sympathetic enough to let you pay it off in instalments, without interest, over a period of months.

jamespir

christhompson wrote: »

Really need some advice...

While on holiday in tenerife I had my phone stolen from my room, i had it in top drawer all holiday so I only realised it was stolen when i came to pack on the last day.

When i got home i rang 02 to block the sim, only to find I have a bill of £1120, all to spanish numbers, they have literaly abused it for fun! :mad:

I have no phone insurance and on reading the small print of my travel insurance, they dont cover mobile phones, never mind the costs of the calls.

I have spoken to 02 and so far they have been quite sympathetic and instructed me to wirte to their complaints department to see if anything could be done.

I just want advice from anyone who has experianced this?

My argument with 02 is that once the bill had reached £500 in 2 days! why they didnt put a stop on the account?

Any help gladly appreciated!

if you had phoned as soon as you knew you ahd lost it you perhaps would have been covered therfore 02 arent obliged to do anything my advice is to say to them youll pay a certain amount of the calls and see what they say

Jon_01

I am surprised that O2 didn't notice the usage when the files came through from Tenerife.
It's part of my job to go through them (but I don't work for O2, sorry). If I'd have seen that amount of calls suddenly appear I'd have called the customer and gone through a security check and if he passed, then told him how much he was using...

O2 obviously work in a different way.

spirit

Our network operates the same 'high usage' report in the same way Jon 01. sorry I don't work for 02 either.

I know this is of no use either but I always put my phone in the safe along with my tickets, passport and any other valuables. As holiday season is upon us though, is a timely reminder to others to lock theirs in the safe.

Money_Grabber13579

If it was stolen from your hotel room, it is obviously a member of the hotel staff that took it. Why not pursue the hotel for the bill?

gjchester

Money_Grabber13579 wrote: »

If it was stolen from your hotel room, it is obviously a member of the hotel staff that took it. Why not pursue the hotel for the bill?

Why assume that? You've no idea if it was an inside job, the OP left the door unlocked one day by accident, or it was someone off the street who picked the lock and stole a whole bunch of phones that day to sell on.

pwni

I can't believe I'm reading this today. Almost exactly the same thing is happening to me.

I have just today returned from Cambodia after 10 weeks - when I arrived there, I put a local sim in my phone and put my O2 sim away. Now I return to find that O2 have already debited £1386 from my account and better still there's another bill coming out next week for £1200. Obviously the sim has been stolen along the way but because I wasn't using it, it never crossed my mind to go looking for it.

The money wasn't in my account for the first payment so now I'm £1200 overdrawn, I don't know where they think the next payment is coming from.

My point is this - surely O2 owe me a duty of care to have some anti-fraud measures in place to flag something up if my bill is 14000% higher than normal. I'm quite prepared to accept that I should pay something as it's obviously my sim card and my responsibility but I can't accept that they could let my normally moderate bill run so high over two consecutive months without any alarm bells ringing.

Going to see solicitor tomorrow - hopefully I'll find some legal light at the end of the tunnel. I can't believe O2 have no duty of care in a situation like this. I'm praying they do anyway. :embarasse

robt_2

Money_Grabber13579 wrote: »

If it was stolen from your hotel room, it is obviously a member of the hotel staff that took it. Why not pursue the hotel for the bill?

What a totally absurd comment.

Leopard

pwni,

Your solicitor will charge you £200 an hour plus VAT (more, in London) to tell you what is written in Post #3 above. Unless s/he thinks you will be game for pursuing a lost cause through the courts at a similar rate of legal fees.

The attitude of O2 will be that if you could not afford personally to assume the risk of incurring the losses arising from theft of your SIM card, you should have insured yourself against it.

I assume you ensured that your home and its contents were insured while you were abroad? The same reasoning applies: you insured it because you could not afford to bear personally the losses arising from a burglary.

You contracted voluntarily to indemnify O2 against loss arising from misuse of the SIM card unless and until you informed them that it had been misappropriated. They will require you to honour that contractual obligation.


PS. You got a free Thanks: my mouse slipped when I was aiming for the Quote button.

(And that's the only beneficial thing you're likely to get out of pursuing this.)