Huge bill on Orange stolen phone.

emily1504

gjchester wrote: »

This is not intended as a nasty comment but did you read the T&C's before signing up?

Most people don't so would have no idea what was or was not in them.

Many years ago a teacher gave us a test without warning, 20-30 questions started off easy (name, class etc) and got to be impossible. Many people were puzzled. A few (and I was the 2nd to finish) had followed his instrucuction of always reading through the questions before starting and the last question was "Do not answer any questions and stick your hand up".

Seems a silly thing now but it taught me to read things through before starting out on anything. Unfortunatly many people do not.

I completely agree but what I don't understand that there is clearly a lot of people that have experienced the same thing as me that they don't notice their phone missing for ages then spend time looking for it and it can be a half a day to a day before they report it. If anyone hear wants to tell me that's unusual then I would say you were being ridiculous. As a result of this human nature a lot of people have ended up with huge phone bills. Now if the phone companies cared about their customers wouldn't they say as they notice that the customer is just signing the contract without bothering to read the conditions, that there is a very important policy of reporting your mobile phone that if you fail to do so at that second will leave you liable. There is no reasonable time period given and they would recommend that instead of acting like a human being, you are on constant alert for your mobile phone at all times and if you suspect it missing for a second ring immediately? Oh but no, because if they actually drew your attention to the policy they would not stand to make the massive profits that they do from your victimisation.

emily1504

gjchester wrote: »

Again if it has a PIN it doesn't matter. You have the tools to protect yourself use them.

So why doesn't the company help you do this when you sign up? Having a mobile phone clearly puts you at massive risk from crime, not only the trauma that might come from being stolen from (particularly if its aggressive/violent) but then at the risk of footing the bill? You'd think the lovely phone companies would want to help you prevent this in any way they can. Oh no they don't, because they profit!!!

sporedude

emily1504 wrote: »

So why doesn't the company help you do this when you sign up? Having a mobile phone clearly puts you at massive risk from crime, not only the trauma that might come from being stolen from (particularly if its aggressive/violent) but then at the risk of footing the bill? You'd think the lovely phone companies would want to help you prevent this in any way they can. Oh no they don't, because they profit!!!

Because a company shoudnt have to wipe consumers bums for them...

emily1504

sporedude wrote: »

Because a company shoudnt have to wipe consumers bums for them...

So we don't want to live in a world where companies do everything for us, but we do want to live in a world where companies encourage us to obsess about our mobile phones to the point that goes far beyond simply being anti social? We want to live in a world where if we are victimised the companies aren't interested? And we want to live in a world where the companies aren't interested in protecting us from potential victimisation? Charming, well I guess I did stop to help a woman having a heart attack on the side of the street a couple of years ago and not one single person gave me any assistant even when all I was asking was for someone to tell me the name of the road I was on so I could tell the ambulance. So maybe that is the type of world we want to live in. So no-one will help us out or do anything for us, but heaven forbide us if we are victims because they definitely won't give a crap then
To be honest, I'd much rather the companies took an interest in me and genuinely cared about my life and if you want to call that wiping my bum then fine, but it sure would've saved me a lot of money.

DarkConvict

I still go back to the idea of pin locking the phone.

If you had a credit card with a £10,000 limit and no pin number (or pin printed on the card). if it was stolen someone could rack up quite a bill for you to pay.

The same applies to mobiles, as such make sure you pin lock your phones so that when you turn it on/unlock it it requests the pin number. This way the phone is secured without you need to watch it 24/7.

The operator nor a credit card company can be blamed for losses due to your actions. As Jon01 pointed out people have tried it before. After making a dozen international calls the owners states it is stolen so they do not have to pay. Abuse of the system has lead to this. The end user is responsible, if the end user is irresponsible then so be it, on come the financial penilities for it. And i would push the arguement if you do not like it them do not take out contracts with unlimited liability.

It is horrible that another persons actions costs you money, but you have to take actions to reduce the impact of it. its like this because the network had to respond to the above situation on international calls.

PIN lock your phone, and disable roaming/internet if not in use.

emily1504

I agree with that, but I come back to this point again. Why does the company not immediately advise you to do this? If they genuinely cared about their customers and wanted to prevent their victimisation then they would do that. But obviously they won't because they will profit when this occurs

Also, orange told me they wholeheartedly believed me but it was their policy preventing them from doing it, so therefore in my case it has nothing to do with faking it.

The way to deal with this situation would be for the company to realise they have human beings rather than robots as customers and help them all they can prevent themselves being victims of crime. Further, as the card companies do they can do something about it when calls are made that are unusual. I have been a customer for years and never made calls abroad, and the thieves spent hours ringing up different numbers in all sorts of countries. Obviously not me. But as I have said plenty of times, they are not interested because they make so much money. What I have said in a previous comment has not been addressed, but what is the traumatised rape/burglary/robbery victim do? Are they disregarded if they take too long to report their phone stolen? It's an absolute disgrace and I hope these companies can sleep at night knowing they allow their customers to set themselves up for this nightmare

Jon_01

I agree with everything GJ says in post 26, there's no way for the networks to win on this one.

If they cut you off when you call oversea's they'd be criticised. If they allow the calls they're still going to be criticised.
They can't have people sitting there monitoring your calls with millions of acc live it's not possible.

All you can do is set a pin lock (as DC suggests above) and, if you don't call outside the UK as a rule, call up and have an international bar put on your phone. I've always got this on mine. It take a single call to the network and a sim updated to have it removed and greatly reduces the risk if the phone goes walkabout.

MyUserNamesTaken

emily1504 wrote: »

I agree with that, but I come back to this point again. Why does the company not immediately advise you to do this? If they genuinely cared about their customers and wanted to prevent their victimisation then they would do that. But obviously they won't because they will profit when this occurs

Also, orange told me they wholeheartedly believed me but it was their policy preventing them from doing it, so therefore in my case it has nothing to do with faking it.

The way to deal with this situation would be for the company to realise they have human beings rather than robots as customers and help them all they can prevent themselves being victims of crime. Further, as the card companies do they can do something about it when calls are made that are unusual. I have been a customer for years and never made calls abroad, and the thieves spent hours ringing up different numbers in all sorts of countries. Obviously not me. But as I have said plenty of times, they are not interested because they make so much money. What I have said in a previous comment has not been addressed, but what is the traumatised rape/burglary/robbery victim do? Are they disregarded if they take too long to report their phone stolen? It's an absolute disgrace and I hope these companies can sleep at night knowing they allow their customers to set themselves up for this nightmare

So who do you expect to foot the bill for your negligence? Obviously, you don't think you should.

DarkConvict

With regards to advising on PIN locks, information is in the phone manual so commonsense would dictate that a user should turn it on if they want protection.

Banks do not advise you to shred all your documents, but they do advise not to tell others your pin number. Like an operator will say you are liable for all calls made, so you yourself need to be aware of precautions you can take as preventative measures.

Sure networks can advise that for security they should disable the following features if not in use.
But at the end of the day the user still has to respond to this information. people already know roaming can be disabled, they know pin locks can be added. The point is users choice not to bother about it... until they have a problem, when it is too late.
I do pin lock my phone but admit its only for switching it on, if it was stolen when in keylock mode i would still be at risk but i take that on board against entering a pin number everytime i want to just check for messages or use other phone functions, not actually use the service.
If PIN lock only came up when the network service was used and say only requested it once per x minutes (x set by user, default 60). Then the pin feature maybe used more regularly, as entering the pin all the time is a nusience when the protection required is only for a certain range of issues.

Could networks speed up the reporting of data, I'm sure they could as im told PAYG does work differently so you get up to date information on your remaining credit, but i do not believe it would be instantaneous still and would require greater cooperation from networks to share data and probably update the hardware aswell. For the networks it is likely to be not cost effective for what is, lets face it a user issue.
Like CC companies, they have no idea who is actually using the card. I make purchases on my moms CC regularly but i am not an official card holder.

I do also agree networks will not win on either blocking or not blocking calls. I do believe some additional protection could be added given significant campaigning, but i do not believe a sufficient number of customers are affected for this to take hold. Until it does the decision will lie with the business on what to do, and businesses are profit driven. Sure businesses need customer satisfaction to generate profit but mobile operators they know they all make mistakes and users leave for various reasons (just read these forums to see bad comments about all networks)
Networks leave it upto the user to ensure proper use of their service, and i do think this is the best approach given the current technology. Customers want freedom, not a line of code in a computer to cut off connections.

emily1504

I am starting to think that maybe the people here work for mobile phone companies? For a start I wasn't negligent, I was a human being! I am sorry about that, I am sorry that I have some social skills and am not continually checking my phone like some kind of moron. And as is continually ignored, was the rape or robbery victim negligent when they didn't report their phone missing straight away?

Finally, my point has nothing to do with the issues here. My point is that the companies do win, they profit massively from the victimisation of their customers and they do nothing to prevent it from happening except write in miniscal small print that most people ignore, but as I keep saying why would they when they make so much money from it?

All I can say is that the comments on this forum clearly show how marketing and advertising has done it's job in this country. We are all actually like moronic robots incapable of realising when a company is taking the !!!!. Orange, and all the other companies, are laughing all the way to the bank when they don't do their bit to prevent this victimisation and no one will ever convince me that that is okay.

So let's hope no one here ever gets attacked or mugged, or simply even decides to take time off from their mobile and have an actual real life conversation, because god knows you'll pay for it