Please help, I have a real problem

fruit-shoot

Hi All

I have a Nokia N70 on o2, its a great phone I use it for catching up with emails while I am out, I have never been charged for this, but, I have looked at my online bill and gprs is already up at £94!!!! I don't use the web, the strange thing is there is two access's per day at the same time every day, around 11pm and midnight, I have a young baby and I'm in bed at that time.
My question is can digital phones be hacked? O2 say they can't but you lot might know better.
TIA
Heather

espresso

fruit-shoot wrote:

Hi All

I have a Nokia N70 on o2, its a great phone I use it for catching up with emails while I am out, I have never been charged for this, but, I have looked at my online bill and gprs is already up at £94!!!! I don't use the web, the strange thing is there is two access's per day at the same time every day, around 11pm and midnight, I have a young baby and I'm in bed at that time.
My question is can digital phones be hacked? O2 say they can't but you lot might know better.
TIA
Heather

Your post does not make much sense! You say that you "use it for catching up with emails while I am out, I have never been charged for this, but, I have looked at my online bill and gprs is already up at £94!!!!" How do you think that you are accessing your e-mails if not by using GPRS? I'm not familiar with the N70 but it sounds like it is set to check your e-mails automatically every night so read the user guide.

HTH

fruit-shoot

Hi
O2 don't charge for GPRs unless you download from the web, or at least they didn't, they do now at £3.00 per MB. I only found this out since I posted.
The concern I had is that the access times were times I am usually in bed, only twice per day at 11pm and midnight, I don't have it set to retrive automatically, so thats not the problem.
I was supposed to recieve a text message to let me know that they were now charging, but didn't, they will get back to me within a week and hopefully will get my money back, all £300 of it.
If they don't then I will cancel my contract as they changed the terms and conditions without letting me know.

seanparkin

No they haven't, and to be honest you deserve to be billed for it and you should pay for it.

Harsh, but the costs for GPRS have always been published and the fact that you've gotten away with not paying for it so long is something you should be pleased about. There have been no contract changes, you have used the GPRS service, just O2 have not billed for them (their own billing mistake) up until recently.

Email/Web over GPRS are exactly the same thing and are billed exactly the same.

kai666

fruit-shoot wrote:

Hi

I was supposed to recieve a text message to let me know that they were now charging, but didn't, they will get back to me within a week and hopefully will get my money back, all £300 of it.
If they don't then I will cancel my contract as they changed the terms and conditions without letting me know.

where did the £300 come from in your second post? it was £94 in the first

You do use the web, how do you think you get your emails?

fruit-shoot

Thanks for the replies,
As I said in an earlier post, they sent text messages to everyone to let them know that as of 1st April they were now charging £3.00 per MB for usage, I got this phone on the 29th March and didn't recieve a text, apparently neither did a lot of other people. O2 are looking into it and if I wasn't on the mailing list then I will get a full refund. There is £33 and £40 from previous months, plus £94 from this month and possibly £200 for next months bill. Had I known about the charging I would not have used it for email.
I have looked at the terms and conditions both on my contract and on the website and can't find anywhere where it says it charges for GPRS usage, I did ask when I got the phone if email was free and was told it was, it was only when you downloaded content from the web that it charged me.

dmg24

Sounds like you were misled when you got the phone, so the charges do seem unfair. Even if the charges hadn't come into place, with such a small timeframe they must have been aware of them, so they could have said that there were 'no charges at present, but there will be in the near future'. If they're not willing to refund you the charges, perhaps you could agree to meet them in the middle?

With regard to the phone, I am pretty sure they cannot be hacked, however unknown GPRS connections happened to me with my old phone (a Nokia, can't remember the model), always at the same time each day. Spoke to Nokia and Orange (my network at the time) and investigated all sorts of settings on the phone, and never worked out what was doing it. In the end I changed the settings so that when the phone tried to connect it could not. However this isn't a solution if you still want to use the facility!

Hope you get it sorted ... let us know what the problem was ... if they ever work it out!

fruit-shoot

Hi
Thanks for that, I have now passworded both email and web access so hopefully that will do it if its been hacked, also cleared the usage log and have checked that today and no usage over night so that might have worked. It means I can still use email if I want to, but no one else can.

kai666

just out of interest, what tariff are you on?

Did they actually tell you there were no charges for GPRS?

fiish

O2 are not exactly prompt about their GPRS billing; usage could only show several bills later and is usually clustered (not being billed for a while then being hit for massive usage in one go). They still take all your monthly allowances (if any) into account however.

Personal experience with it has been with rather small charges, but still: I have been outside the UK since June and my July bill shows a few hundred KB's of GPRS usage, for which I was charged 32p for going over my 100KB limit.

fruit-shoot

Hi
I'm on o2 250, I did have 2mb bundle added but have just today cancelled it. I won't be using GPRS at all now.
I have always been charged one month in arrears for GPRS, but there is no consistancy in their billing, ie, some are free and some aren't, even on the same day not like call charges where you use free call allowance first.