Excessive Directory Enquiries Cost

tacnis

I wish to share my experience with 192.com. I wanted to find the telephone number of someone I had lost contact with. I entered their name and the last known town of residence. From the results I selected what seemed to be the correct match. When I selected 'View' I was presented with the following message: While directory enquiries on 192.com is free, most of our listings are premium and not in the phone book. To view premium records like this one, you need to register and get some credits. It just takes a few minutes. More Info. Very little detail is given in the 'More Info' link, but the following is the section that relates to credits: How do credits work? Credits are the currency of 192.com and allow users to search Premium Information. Credits start from as little as 23p. They can be bought by selecting one of our credit packages. Some premium databases only cost 1 credit per search such as the 2012 Electoral Roll, some searches such as those for company and director reports use up 5 or 6 credits per search. 6 credit packages are valid for one month. All other credit packages are valid for six months. Each search deducts the relevant number of credits from a user's account. I decided to proceed. The costs for 6 credits is £11.94 (you can only get credits 23p if you are prepared to spend a lot more). At the same time I was also asked if I wanted to pay £5 to enable me to do advanced searches. I felt that asking for someones telephone number did not constitute an advanced search, so I declined. After putting in my card details I was required to activate my account using an email sent to me. After selecting the activate button from the email I was directed to my account where I was informed that I had already used one of my credits!!!! I looked in vain for any option that may have recorded the results of my search, but could not find one. I used the the 192.com 'Contact Us' option to inform them of this and that I needed reimbursing one credit. Meanwhile I tried the search again and selected 'View', this time I was told this was an advanced search and that I needed to pay the additional £5 (plus £1 credit card fee). I paid this. I was now given the address of the person, but no telephone number. However I was given the option to search for a telephone number, which I did, but none was found. I tried to find the number of one other person, but ended up with the same results. It ended up that somehow I had used up 6 credits to find what I consider to be basic information. I may have been willing to pay £9 per person for this information, but I feel that the system is designed to deliberately mislead you into thinking that it will cost considerably less. It seems that selecting virtually any link will cost you in the region of £2. My recommendations would be to steer clear of this website, but if you have to use it spend 2 or 3 hours understanding what you are committing to.

pmduk

Why didn't you use the online BT phonebook which is free?

kuohu

pmduk wrote: »

Why didn't you use the online BT phonebook which is free?

And paragraphs

tacnis

I tried it, but the person I was trying to find was not listed in the BT phone book.

dacouch

I think 192.com are missing something, their "contact us" should involve a search of 192.com to find the telephone number

Chickabiddybex

You should have used Facebook!

And for the love of god please stop giving them even more of your money! As soon as you get stuck you put in your card details! This is a bad habit. How much have you paid in total? For a number you haven't even acquired too! And who knows if they even have it. Ask for your money back if you can.

keyser666

If they have been there for a while look online to download UK Info disc,

kermitfrog

kuohu wrote: »

And paragraphs...

Definitely paragraphs. It's just too tedious to struggle to read it.