Vodafone bill problem

Lally

My brother got a new phone via Vodafone and just received his first bill. He is like me, a very very light user and is definitely not interested in texting or calling any expensive numbers for ringtones and the like.

He just received a bill for £180 for the first month, most of which were charges for texts he RECEIVED. He has no idea why they texted him, or why he got charged for texts received and not sent. He contacted Vodafone and all they did was tell him to pay up.

He said he wants out of the contracxt as he is disgusted with them, they said to do this he would need to pay for the remaining 11 months all in one go.

Unfortunately I have not got a note of the number/s he received the texts from so I can't google it as yet, but that doesnt get away from the fact that he is stuck with this bill. Is anyone aware of any such scams at the moment? is there anything he can do? Many thanks in advance.

ultrak3wl

There are some sneaky companies out there who send you a text message at random - if you reply you are deemed to have clicked on "OK I am an idiot please send me a load more crap" and you get a never-ending stream of expensive texts. It happened to me - I got a "Service Info Message" and when I opened it a GPRS session started and I ended up at some dating website, followed soon by incoming flirty text messages at 85p each.

Not having a go at your brother but he must have received a fair amount of weirdo text messages to crank up £180 in a month - did he not think something was up? Anyway the only way out is to text "STOP" to the sender, or there is an 0845 number (don't remember what but Voda should tell you) which these people are obliged to make available where you can tell them not to send any more.

http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/cgi-bin/viewnews.cgi?newsid1107172361,61876,

Can I reclaim the charges?

If you believe you never signed up for the service you can attempt to get a refund either from the service provider or your network provider. To do this you will need to find out the details of the service provider who is sending you the texts, which can be done using the number checker on ICSTIS.

http://www.icstis.org.uk/consumers/ncd/default.asp

Lally

Thanks for that ultrak3wl. I think he was charged about £1.50 a text and if he received 3 or so of those a day then it would all add up.

He didn't bother making enquiries as he didn't realise he was being charged for them and he now says he cannot believe it and did not think for a minute he would be facing a bill for them. Silly I know, but in hindsight he should have contacted someone right away.

MrRincewind

get the short codes for the text messages that he was recieving (they appear as a 5 digit number) and put them into this website

http://www.icstis.org.uk/

and you should get the details for the company that was involved