Vodafone - The Thieving Network!

SlyOne_2

Hi,

I've been a Vodafone customer for a long time now (9 years and counting) and have had my fair share of dealing with them over wrong bills a lot of times, but this new episode now takes the biscuit.

Took out a 12 month contract with them last year in June, no phone, only free mins and texts for £19.99. Deal was half price line rental for the duration of the contract (down from £40).

However the price was put back up in month 9 and I have now been charged 2 months at full price already. Vodafone will not budge saying that these are their commercial rules and that they do not discount the full length of the contract. All fair enough but shouldn't this be made clear BEFORE the person agrees to the contract? Because really what they are doing is give 9 months at half price over a 12 month contract. If they presume that I will renew my contract with them at month 9 and ergo benefit from the discounted line rental until month 12 and beyond, surely it is very wrong. For one, it robs me of my basic human right of the freedom of choice and the other it's blatant misselling.

I am really not happy about this and will be writing in to Vodafone but just so new/renewing customers are aware, be very careful of their offers. I'd expect this from the market trader, but then again, I have had to have corrections to my bills at least 12 times over the past 9 years.

That's Vodafone for you.

parallax_20

Did Vodafone not send you an upgrade letter to confirm what your renewal offer consisted of? Always ask for one as evidence of any deal that is agreed, otherwise there is little comeback and its your words against theirs. Look on the positive side, you only have one more month to go before the contract ends...otherwise downgrade the tariff to ease the pain if they allow it. If it was not an upgrade, and you have a copy of the original deal on offer, send them a copy of it.

mrochester

This happened to my mum too. Her loyalty discount was removed after 9 months of the 12 month and the only way to continue getting that discount was to sign up to a further 12 months. I spoke to customer services about this and the guy I spoke to was very apologetic about it, and credittted the account. He also agreed entirely that it was very wrong of the sales department to be so misleading and admitted that they get a lot of calls complaining about this.

SlyOne_2

They would not credit the account back in my case unless I signed up to a new deal.

What I have done is cancel the direct debit and will be seeking my PAC today itself so I can move across somewhere else. In my books, they've already overcharged me by £40 over the 2 penultimate months of my contract, so they already owe me as I would also expect the last month to be at £20.

They did not send me any paperwork with the deal - they never have in the past either. What I have done however is always phone up a few days after renewal (within the cooling off period) to ask someone else how long my contract was showing as in their data. Once satisfied with that, I never queried the rest.

In any case, when they offer discounted line rental for a specific period only, it says so on the bill (e.g. 6 months half-price line rental discount) - in my case, it was just a generic discount on the full price rental which shows that this was meant for the full length of the contract, irrespective of whether I choose to renew or not at month 9.