The Mobile Outlet

8lue5avannah

I too have a cash back contract with tmo, does anyone know what would happen if I cancel my direct debits with them?

laticsforlife

8lue5avannah wrote: »

I too have a cash back contract with tmo, does anyone know what would happen if I cancel my direct debits with them?

Exactly which Direct Debit do you have that actually pays out to TMO ??

R U sure it is not a DD to your network providor, i.e. Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile, or O2 ?

In which case they will send round their debt collection agency to enforce their contract with YOU, not with TMO.

kltpzyxm

Hello Brenda,
nice to hear from you again. Congrats on the promotion.
Fortunately, I'm not as far down the legal route as I could have been thanks to the defence by TMO against my MCOL claim, so I find it amusing that they have actually saved me money that I would have spent on legal fees. Currently I am owed £84 cashback and am out of pocket by £25 for the MCOL submission. I informed the court that I wished to proceed with the case despite the defence but have not received any correspondence or paid any other fees. It has also cost me approx £30 for Special Delivery charges. Being philosophical about the whole matter, If I balance this against they £100+ phone that I got for free, the £35 a month contract (500 mins +250 text) and the £30 from quidco, it has cost me less than £10 for the whole years contract...
I was prepared to write this off ages ago, but decided to continue on principal....
Maybe I'll just let it go now.....
As I have a company mobile, I don't need another contract (thank God) and my employers doesn't mind me making personal calls on it...even from Thailand....LOL

cerreno

Shelby wrote: »

You're being unrealistic.

1) A bet is a contract.

2) Unlike a bet with a bookmaker, the important difference was that these contracts were bets that a court would enforce.

3) The real bet, as was pointed out, was whether or not The Mobile Outlet would be able to sustain a business model that was clearly unviable for long enough for the claimant to obtain payment through the judicial system.

You may also have heard the widely-used comment that the law is a lottery - but let's not go into that.

1. But a contract is not necessarily (nor should be, ever) a bet.

2. I think you'll find a court would enforce an unhonoured bet if the conditions for winning were met.

3. As I pointed out, there was no such bet - no more than when I buy a shirt from M&S, find it has a tear in it and fail to get a refund before they have gone bust. TMO is registered with Companies House and we might expect in good faith that 'clearly unviable' (that laser-guided 20/20 hindsight doing its magic as ever) business models might be prevented by business regulation from ever seeing daylight.

That might be naive, but I'm not being unrealistic. I accept my loss with a lot less complaint than I've seen on here. I can put it down to experience, for sure. But good faith should exist on both sides. This was not like buying a dodgy DVD from a boot sale. Risk was not implicit in the contract. (Contracts in which it is, such as the purchase of investments, have to say so.)

Shelby

kltpzyxm,

Like Brenda, I'm sorry to hear that you just missed out on getting CB5 paid before it all went pear-shaped in Bradford last November.

Do make sure that your back is covered in regard to incurring court cost against you if you now abandon a legal claim that you commenced. Mobile Matters (U.K.) Ltd. might apply for these upon the grounds that it incurred costs defending a claim commenced against you that was spurious.

Having got this far, and armed with The Mobile Outlet's acknowledgement that your fifth claim was valid, you are, effectively, in an invincible position if you proceed, so it might be better to do this.

You could then hold fire on applying for enforcement and stumping up the bailiff's fee until the position becomes clearer.

Call (or visit) the Court Office to discuss this with them; they're usually very helpful.

Best of luck!


(Remember the other oft-quoted adage that the law is an a**. )

Shelby

Cerreno,

Look at it however you wish; just be realistic about what these deals really were.

The risk was always that the company would collapse before the cashback could be extracted because it was operating to a business model that was doomed to failure.

There's no "laser-guided 20/20 hindsight" being applied here. I was posting on these TMO threads in 2006 that the deals were inherently unsustainable.

(Well, Cobra was. )

As Martin Lewis's articles on this site and as the guide at the beginning of this thread both emphasise, the cashback should only be viewed as a possible bonus that might be obtained from a 'phone contract that one would have purchased anyway. To enter into any of these deals relying on the cashback to pay a line rental that would otherwise be unaffordable was and remains a foolish and potentially disastrous thing to do. Be in no doubt that some people will now lose their homes over this.

What many seem also to have ignored was that any one of a number of unforeseen calamities could have occurred during the currency of the contract that would have put a small company like The Mobile Outlet out of business and resulted in the cashbacks not being paid. A serious fire, fatal illness, death of the directors in a car crash, and so on. As it was, they suffered a flood last July that forced them to move their business premises.

Those who disregarded the advice provided on this site did so at their considerable peril and many of them will now pay a very high price indeed for their folly.

malcognito

Shelby said:

I was posting on these TMO threads in 2006 that the deals were unsustainable.

Only myself to blame of course, but it's a shame that the journalists at the Sunday Times and Independent didn't read the threads before writing such glowing articles in praise of cashback deals, also in 2006!

Shelby

The real villains of the piece, for those seeking someone to blame, are the Trading Standards Officers of West Yorkshire.

This whole thing took place right on their doorstep for well over a year and they did nothing to stop it.

Some might think that they were criminally responsible for permitting so many people to lose so much money on such an obvious pyramid scheme - but I, of course, could not possibly comment on that. :cool:

cerreno

The demonstrably false suggestion that those who have lost money here participated in a "bet" is to level an accusation against them that the risk was transparent and part of the deal, and that anyone who complains is equivalent to someone shouting foul at a bookie because his horse hobbled home last.

When I checked this thread and its predecessor in May/June last year, when I was looking for a new contract, it was full of people saying that they'd got their cashback from TMO no problem, that they'd had friendly, helpful conversations with TMO people on the phone and been sent extra copies of the terms and conditions after requesting it by e-mail. I accessed the deal that suited me from OneCompare, which Martin has consistently trumpeted as good people (and they are), and OneCompare, at that time, still had a page describing how cashback worked and so on. The deals have been approved in the business pages of the serious papers and there are plenty of people who can testify to these cashback schemes working. But apparently we should have had the foresight to ignore all this and listen to a few Cassandras on this thread who could see it all tumbling down.

People come to this site looking for cheap deals and freebies. Was getting paid to buy meat pies 'too good to be true'? Surely it should have been.

I accept full responsibility for my own mistakes and don't intend to pursue any action on this matter. It may very well be the case that events have borne out your predictions. But at a time when people have lost hundred of pounds, coming on here and saying, "Well, I saw all this happening years ago, if only you'd listened to me" -- well, it is unseemly and unhelpful and -- some would say worse.

titchieboy

Hi all,
Bought the Daily Mirror to see an article on page 29 'Penman & Sommerlad investigate' title 'Cashblack mark for phone firms' which is mainly about TMO!! The Director Attif Ashraf tells of a pile of excuses (lies!!) and says near the end of the article that 'he's ran out of money, he can't pay 5000 customers £600,000 and will have to go into administration'!
Thats some of my money and we all know what will happen in a few months time when this con artist sets up another business and starts ripping more people off!!
For the full article you should buy a copy of todays Daily Mirror. If I get the time soon I'll type it all in unless someone can be bothered to do it first.
I've lost out on £336!