Advice please - Orange data charges

Peasmummy

My husband recently went to Oman for 3 weeks. When he arrived he received a text message from Orange to detail local charges, inc £8/MB data. It stated that a 10MB bundle could also be purchased for £15 by texting a number. He texted the number then a few days later sent 4 more messages to that number to purchase 4 more bundles. After the first purchase Orange sent a message to confirm the purchase stating he had purchased the 10MB/30 days bundle and once it had run out standard charges would apply. There was no message after the subsequent purchases.

He used just under 70MB of data while over there and had assumed he had purchased 50MB in the bundle scheme that they had offered.

His phone bill came out of our account a few days ago for £625! His monthly contract is £35/mth, we were expecting a bill of c.£120 as he had briefly rung me from Oman. We weren't aware that he had gone over the data bundles he thought he'd purchased.

He rang Orange to query the amount and was told that you can only buy one data bundle a month, so he had used 60MB at their full rate. Nowhere in the communications from them, from the initial message to the confirmation message did it state this. They also did not reply to the 4 messages he sent to purchase the additional bundles to warn him of this or tell him the transactions hadn't gone through.

A 2hr phone call to Orange later and they are looking into it. We have demanded that they adjust the bill to charge us for 5x bundles, plus usual contract, any other usage and the data he used in excess of the 5x bundles, although we don't know how he managed to use so much extra data as he only used it to check maps and the news.

Are we right in being absolutely outraged by this? Surely it should have been stated in the T&Cs clearly that there was a limit of one data bundle a month! And surely they should have rejected his requests to purchase additional bundles and communicated with him at that stage that he had exceeded his bundle purchase limit?!


What do you think, and what would you do in this situation?

Sorry this was so lengthy, but all advice gratefully received! Thanks in advance.

NFH

Peasmummy wrote: »

he only used it to check maps and the news.

Maps are one of the highest consumers of data. Added to that are all the background tasks that most smartphones do which consume data almost continuously.

Everything else you say makes sense though. Don't give up until Orange give you a big discount, and ask them whether they will apply one of their much cheaper business data roaming bundles. Orange's standard roaming charge of £8000 per gigabyte is outrageous, compared to their more reasonable charge of around £10 per gigabyte within the UK.