Virgin Mobile extremly high bill, what to do?

cipdia

Hello,

I'll try to keep it short. Late last year I have received a couple of high bills from Virgin Mobile and when confronted them I was told they introduced the first minute billing rule where they charge you a full first minute, no matter if you call is 1 sec. That resulted in my minutes going off the windows very fast. Because I was caught with other problems I decided to just increase the minutes (3 times) so I won't be bothered again with this issue, so I went from 150min/month to 500. Now 2 days ago I've got a text that I have gone over the credit limit, which is £100, and that my account is suspended. I know I haven't gone over the limit and my usual bill is not higher than £30. I tried ringing them but after 20-30 minutes to call just ends ... nobody picks up, i've tried accessing my account... and it can't be done, i get an error saying they have technical problems. I will receive my latest bill sometime next week, if it proves to be their fault, a miscalculation, am I entitled to cancel the contract due to the fact that they didn't provide the services for this days.

I don't know what to do, I can't afford bills like that one.

Any help will be appreciated.

Fire_Fox

Have you read your copy of the terms and conditions? How many short calls are you making each month? Can't some of these be avoided completely, made from a landline, e-mail or texts instead?

cipdia

Hi,

Thanks for the reply.

I have read it and I couldn't find anything about the first minute thing. I've searched my e-mail inbox and I haven't found anything regarding the change to the contract. I cannot remember if I received an sms or not due to the fact that the mobile I have from them crashed several times deleting all my text entries. To be honest I have made some calls during the last period but not that many, I have checked my minutes 1 week prior to the allowance refresh and I still had about 120min. To reach £100+ extra I would've had to use about 300min+ above the remaining 120, and there is no way I could have done that. Another disturbing thing is that when they blocked my account I had £120+ extra in charges. I've checked again now by calling 789 and now it's £154. HOW??? If the account was blocked and I couldn't make any calls or text anyone. Something is wrong, I can feel it, but the thing is every time I try to connect to an operator the call is dropped after a while, it's starting to stress me out. I'll surely cancel the contract with them if they are to blame.

parallax_20

Two things that could be increasing your bill without your knowledge...

1. Have you inadvertently signed up to a texting service? Where the service will regularly send you texts for which you will be billed for at a premium rate.

2. Data charges are the normal culprits. If you have a smartphone then its likely you may have a widget i.e. twitter, facebook etc...app that will regularly update itself using the internet. Depending on if you have a data plan in place or not, these could be costing you £3-4 per MB of data. So if you have a data hungry application that uses the internet a lot, it can mount up quite quickly. I would suggest check your mobile applications to ensure none are running in the background or if you have an email application to increase the interval for retrieving emails or turn off Push if it has this capability. Are you using your mobile as a modem or have you recently updated the firmware on your phone? Some firmwares can be quite big to download and upgrade OTA (over the air) and normally recommended to be done over WIFI.

You really need to view the breakdown of your bill to find out where exactly your charges are going towards. Are you not able to view your mobile bill online?

mazza111

Their site is up and running today, hopefully you should be able to see where you're spending it.

cipdia

@parallax_20
I do have a smartphone, but I never used more than 10% of my 1gb data allowance, and this my staying online at least 1 hour every day, mostly e-mail, no youtube or heavy downloads. I'll try ringing customer service again today, maybe this time I'll get through.

@mazza111
Tried logging in right now, same message:

OOPS... We're having a few technical problems at the moment. Our team are onto it and we're working as fast as we can to fix it.

LIKE TO BUY A PHONE OR SPEAK TO A MEMBER OF OUR SALES TEAM?
For the latest Pay Monthly or Pay As You Go deals, just give the team a call on 0845 6000 070 and they'll be happy to help.
IF YOU'VE GOT ANY OTHER QUESTIONS FOR OUR TEAM
Give us a call on 0845 6000 789 (789 from a Virgin Mobile phone) or send an email to [EMAIL="theteam@virginmobile.com"]theteam@virginmobile.com[/EMAIL]. We're here to help 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
We'll have things up and running again just as soon as we can.
The team
Virgin Mobile

cipdia

if my outgoing calls & texts are blocked, maybe they blocked the online account as well. Anyway I've sent an e-mail to [EMAIL="theteam@virginmobile.com"]theteam@virginmobile.com[/EMAIL]. Waiting for the answer!!!!!