A long long time ago in an Orange Customer Service Centre far far away

TomUK

Anyone else had this problem? I don't check my pay as you go account too often, but a recent trip to USA seemed to deplete my credit very quickly. I knew that texts from USA to UK were costing me 45p each, but the credit drain seemed excessive. On checking my account online I found that nearly all the texts I had sent were each double entered, one after the other. Same date, same time, same number. So I was being charged 90p (45p x2) per text, I thought it may have been a problem with the roaming system, but then I saw that even before the USA trip and using a different (dual band) handset in the UK, many of my UK texts had also been double entered. I could only check back one month so don't know how long this has been happening. The UK problem was not too costly because I receive a certain number of free texts per month, but when my 12p charge kicks in I am charged 24p because of the double entry.
I called Orange and their technician updated my SIM card, credited £5 to my account and gave a month's free calls and texts, which went some eway to compensating for the excess charge of £7.20 for the USA texts.
Now here's the irony. Later in the day I received a text from Orange asking me to answer a couple of questions about the service I had received earlier that day. This involved two texts from them to me and two from me to them in reply. Guess what! My texts to the 249 number were shown as four texts when I checked the account later (although in my phone's SENT box only two appear) - i.e. each text had appeared twice. These texts were free, but obviously the problem persists.
Anyone else encountered this problem? How can I resolve it?

Naf

Have you considered the length of the messages? And the content (special characters and such)? The simplest answer is that your texts went over the single SMS limit. One oddity I noticed once, however, was when I selected a particular character (I forget which, might have been something simple as a semi-colon), a single text of just a few words was sending as 11 separate texts. And that was within the UK.