Mobile bill is a little high Dad!

Josie64

just wondering but the mobile company , it is T-mobile by any chance? , the reason I ask is my son ( age 18) had a con-tract phone and thought he was getting internet access as park of the flext package but he wasn't and got a high bill ( higher than the £35 month) and now its gone to a debt agency .....good luck , let us know how you get on

La_Tristesse_Durera

That is completely shocking - although I'm sure you're angry / upset etc, I'm sure she isn't feeling too good either. If it is probably a bill she has ran up, I think we also have to look at the phone company's responsibility here as well as hers.

I still can't get my head around £8.5k in a month!!!!

Now, I know previous posters have said that it's not down the the provider to stop / bar / query calls because theirs have gone from £50 to £300 (for example)... we're not even talking about £500 or £1k... this is almost £10k!! A good house deposit, a new car, round the world trip!! Not 'an extra 20 quid per month'.

Because of the vast size of this I would really really fight it. I'm sure a court would say the same too, so I'd let them take me to court. This could be ideal as she has no income, car (?), secured loans etc, but potentially this could effect her credit file which is a gamble if you lose the case.

I'd say the blame is 50 / 50, so propose a compromise with the phone company. Even if you can get it halved (I know £4k is still extortionate), then it would be a start.

If she then got say a supermarket job, worked Sundays & did overtime, took (roughly) £800pm home, then in less than a year the £4k could be paid off.

I'm no money expert but hopefully that helps. That's what I'd do.

kevin_M

ok regarding the bill it will be bad news. if u go down the reported stolen route u can only report the phone up to 24 hrz after it goes missing to get any sort of clam

depending on what sort of credit pass she got with the mobile phone how long she was with it will set her credit limit might be unlimited

regarding the calls to oz OUCH. TBH the mobile co that your with do will show there internatonal call charges and be in there T&Cs about the rates and charges..

mobile phone co's will expect the full payment but will be able to set up a payment plan... the only way to get a lower settlement from a mobile co is after it gets sold to a DCA.

whatever way it goes there will be a bad mark on her credit file

sorry for the bad news.. hope it helps

BertieMeldrew

Throw the phone in the river. If she does "need" one then get her a PAYG... she'll soon learn

Good luck... I can understand how you must feel (I think...)

lynsayjane

Judi wrote:

Thanks for that, that sounds about right for him. I will talk to him later about it - and if it is the case, figure out what to do about it.

there is also the risk it's actually genuine calls. my mum found she kept 'losing' top ups. turns out o2 don't bill after every call so take big whacks off randomly so you thik you've paid for a call and stil got x left when you don't. oh and my mums defiatly not signed up to any ringtone companies.

reehsetin

seriously - 8k cant be right, go over it with a tooth comb! i dont know about having a limit on the account i asked a couple of years ago to have one and they wouldnt let me - saying it wasnt possible - yeah right!
but she must have been on the phone pretty much 24/7! even at £1 a min thats over 8000 mins! she wouldnt have had time to eat!
i would honestly check every number check there arent any unusual numbers, ask them to check what IMEI the calls are coming through like someone said the sim card could have been cloned something.
glup - i got screamed at the one time my bill went upto £80!

Molanole

A few people have said that it's not the phone company's responsibility to activate a call limit on the phone but, my sister never activated her call limit and they still blocked her phone every months due to abnormal usage and that was only £200 in two weeks - THIS IS £8K!!!!!! Surely something has gone wrong with the billing??

Mind you, its probably not as many hours as the calculations showed. I make that about £1489.36 will be VAT :eek: so *only* £7021.27 will have been call and/or data charges.

Gosh.... _pale_ Good luck.

calleyw

WOW that makes the bill my student step daughter racked up of £250 ish for month look tiny.

She was warned not to go down the contract route and stick with PAYG. She too had no real income so how she was able be credit scored for mobile phone being a student and getting about £100 month in wages is beyond me.

I blame my step daugther for the bill not the company as she used the phone and racked up the charges. But I am horrified that a certain company where the future is bright. Allowed her to get a contract in the first place.

You can try and fight the charges. But in the end if she made the calls she needs to pay the charges. You can blame the company all you like for giving her the contract. But at 19 she is reponsible adult. Which means taking reponsibility for her own actions. I know this sounds tight and nasty but it is a hard lesson to learn. We used £50 from my step daughters savings account to give her some breathing room. Then she went agreed to payments of something like £50 a week and she had only just started a temp job :mad: Kids can you tell them anything. Nope, we told her to offer say £1 as at the time she has no job. And then to up payments.

If it ever goes to court which might be the best thing even though it will muck her credit rating big time. You might get a better result.

Mind you I heard on the radio today about a pensioner who had a heart oepration and wrote a cheque for £10k knowing full well he did not have the money and it bounced. And is now paying back it back at £25 a month. And then claimed he has done nothing wrong as he was just getting back all the NI he had paid in for years back in one lump Don't think he understands how the system works :rotfl:

I wish you all the best.


Yours


Calley

patwa_2

Hi. Hope other posters don't take offence here but...

I know a lot of people have mentioned getting an itemised bill, but until that actually arrives there's not very much you can do with regards to starting to sort out the problem. There are a lot of posts in this thread, so I'm just going to sort of bullet out an action plan which you may or may not find helpful and group everything together.

A. Get the facts from your daughter. She used the phone, and only she knows what happened from her end.
1. Who did she call in Australia? A friend, or, forgive the synicism, boyfriend?
2. Does she know if she was calling her friend on the friends landline or mobile?
3. How long did she spend talking to this friend at a time? Investigate the points raised re: batteries running low - it's a valid point.
4. And you might as well find out why she didn't just use a landline (unless of course you'd banned her from making international calls from your home phone).
5. If last month's bill was within normal limits, why did she suddenly start phoning this particular person?
6. Explain that you have no intention of paying off the bill, but that you do intend to make enquiries about it. Get her authority to allow you to discuss the matter with the phone company. This has to be done by her over the phone, so ask her to phone up, speak to them, then pass the phone to you. Tell her to sit there with you whilst you discuss the matter with the phone company.

B. Contact the phone company - they generated the bill and are demanding the charges that they are.
1. Ask for a breakdown of the bill with full itemisation. Get last month's bill as well to compare if any of the highly-charged numbers were called last month.
2. Ask them if there is a credit limit set on the account and if so, what it is.
3. Ask them, if a credit limit was set, why it was able to be exceeded.
4. Ask the company for their terms and conditions. If they contain a clause about usage monitoring relating to abnormally high usage, see if these terms were met. If not, ask the company why they did not investigate the unusually high bill.
5. As you are supposedly into the new month, block all premium and international calls, premium rate texts, GPRS and WAP usage and basically anything that can be blocked other than her free monthly allowances. See if you can also block UK 0845/70/71 numbers. These are usually charged at 15-20p per minute and it's better to be safe than sorry. Besides, if she's mainly calling friends, I doubt they'd be sitting behind such numbers.
6. Explain that you'll have to go through the itemised bill first, but get the fact stated now that this bill will never be fully paid. Explain the situation with your daughter re: lack of income. There's little point in them hounding her/you for full payment as it's never going to happen.

I cannot comment on blame re: your daughter, as we don't know the make-up of the charges, and this is something we must all keep in mind. There's no point jumping to conclusions when we don't have all the facts. We can, however, reasonably attribute blame to the phone company. They are there to make money, yes, but in order for that to happen, they have to be paid by their customers. And customers who use their services in a manner that results in them being unable to pay the charges are a risk. Therefore, it follows that companies will try to minimize risks to themselves, hence the credit scoring when taking out the contract in the first place. If £50 is the normal spend, it therefore follows that when the spending usage exceeded £150 or so, alarm bells should have started ringing, as at that point your daughter was a potential risk to the company, as there was no guarantee that she would be able to pay those charges. Granted, there would have been a time-lapse between the time the call was made and the time the charges were known, but whenever the first charges that exceeded the normal spend by more than double were known, which would have been well before the time the bill was generated, that is when investigations should have started. You need to get an answer to this question, and in my experience, it is not one that most frontline customer service reps can/will answer.

I hope this helps, if only by putting everything into prospective and in one place. Do keep us posted on what happens. Again, I will say that you must wait until you know exactly what your daughter is being charged for. We can theorise and debate until the cows come home, but at the end of the day we need the actual solid facts of the matter, which at the moment we do not have. I can only imagine the worry you both are feeling, but please do try to keep this under control until you have something definite to aim it at.

Cheers and take care.

Hussein.

rkh001

Shrugging her shoulders constitutes irresponsibility, a bit like "whatever"! My step-daughter does the same.

Your daughter needs to learn this very hard lesson - mobile phones are great for emergencies etc but not for international calls! What do these young people talk about all day? Baffles me. But I think you are right -she needs to deal with this debt herself. It will teach her more than just the value of money.

Tough one for you though but hang in there and watch how things pan out.

Good luck.