Massive Vodaphone Bill Shock!

Scottish_Princess

Hello, can anyone give me any advice about this. Never slept last night. Been to Spain with my son, who has an iPhone 4. Has Data Roaming turned off, and we have wifi in the house in Spain. Has a contract of £15 and just yesterday had to ring Voda as they said they would cut me off by 4pm if I didn't. They told me it was over a two week period, all Data Roaming Charges and the total was £1,180!!!. The first I knew, received a text 27/4 saying we've noticed your usage is higher than usual. So went on and could see my outstanding balance was £400 for four phones. Thought I could live with that. Until the text yesterday, I had no idea it had got so out of hand.
They are saying at Voda that as I had an unusually high bill back in August of 2010 for £800, they said that most customers, who have bills like this and recently high bills, would rather not be pestered, and you are allowed to go as high as this?
I feel that, as the bill payer, I should have been informed much earlier, even though it was my sons phone number, I am still responsible for all the bills. Could anyone please help me, I am at my wits end. They want at least half the payment today, and don't know what to do?


Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

DTDfanBoy

Scottish_Princess wrote: »

Been to Spain with my son, who has an iPhone 4. Has Data Roaming turned off, and we have wifi in the house in Spain.

Obviously your son didn't have data roaming turned off the whole time, perhaps he could get a part time job

grumbler

Scottish_Princess wrote: »

I feel that, as the bill payer, I should have been informed much earlier,

Much earlier than what?
Have they not warned you when it was £400?
Instead of checking the reason and or switching the phone(s) off you just ignored the warning and allowed the bill to run up to £1.2K.

There is a default roaming spending cap for EU. Have you bought any roaming bundle that would have opted you out of the default cap?

DTDfanBoy wrote: »

... perhaps he could get a part time job...

...and sell his beloved iPhone and get some basic phone for a tenner instead that he is capable of keeping under control.

Frozen_up_north

On Three I have data roaming turned off in the system, is this something you can do for the future (and the benefit of others reading this) on Vodafone?

Also, can you set a maximum out of bundle charge limit? I think it's set on my account (on Three) to a max of the monthly charge, ie £18 on my One Plan. Although I have been told the networks seem unable to limit charges when roaming on a contract phone easily, due to the delay in the data being passed back and forth to them from the overseas network... Funny how PAYG doesn't suffer from this :mad:

Frozen_up_north

grumbler wrote: »

There is a default roaming spending cap for EU. Have you bought any roaming bundle that would have opted you out of the default cap?

The Guardian had this to say on roaming last year:

From 1 July 2013, British travellers in the EU will pay a maximum of €0.24 (20p) a minute to make a call, or €0.07 (6p) a minute to receive one, while sending a text message will cost €0.08 (7p). The cost of downloading one megabyte of data will be capped at €0.45 (38p), and no user can be charged more than €50 (£43) in one billing period for data usage.

Which part of £43 do Vodafone not understand?

grumbler

Frozen_up_north wrote: »

Also, can you set a maximum out of bundle charge limit?

Very few networks allow this, and Voda isn't one of them. That said, AFAIK all must allow setting a cap on your request for data roaming charges.

Frozen_up_north wrote: »

The Guardian had this to say on roaming last year:

Which part of £43 do Vodafone not understand?

The Guardian is dangerously superficial and over-simplistic. They fail to say that if one buys a roaming bundle the default cap might not apply anymore:

WARNING! Opting out of the €50 EU cut-off limit

Current EU regulations mean providers have to cut you off when you've used €50 (around £51 including VAT) of data in a month when roaming overseas (see MSE News story).
When signing up for one of the mobile provider add-ons listed below, you may be automatically opted out of the EU €50 cut-off limit.
This means you'll have to monitor your data usage carefully, otherwise you could arrive home to a big bill.

MSE article: Data Roaming

BadBehaviour

Well, maybe data roaming, as DTDfanBoy said, wasn't turned off all the time, because you were ok with the £400 you had run up until then, which tells me that you were aware of data usage.

Next time just turn off mobile data completely and, trust me, there will be no surprises then. I read that on iPhones sometimes even with data roaming off there can still be data usage.

I am sure the Vodafone Representative will see this thread and you might be able to get some help that way.

System

Vodafone tried to hit me with a bill in excess of £650 for a mobile dongle in the past. They had applied the wrong tariff upon signing up in-store and continued to insist that I owed them this bill.

I cancelled the direct debit, argued with them on multiple phone calls and eventually they cancelled the bill.

Needless to say, I chose not to continue being a Vodafone customer.

Let me know if you want help with your issue, unfortunately you won't get much sympathy from most of the people in this forum and Vodafone won't help either.

MataNui

I had an iPhone 3Gs on vodafone and found it was a bit funny with data roaming (particularly in Europe). I found that turning data roaming off worked in Spain but not Greece or the channel islands. Vodafone couldnt give me any explanation but my bills were small so i gave up. Turning mobile data off completely seemed to be the only way to be safe.

mrcamp

It's more likely data roaming was not completely turned off on all devices. Your best bet is to try to work with them, to see if they can reduce it a little. And take this as lesson learnt. They are certainly not obliged to reduce the bill any.

grumbler

rikesh wrote: »

....I cancelled the direct debit, ....

Let me know if you want help with your issue, ...

Personally, I would avoid getting any advice from a person that believes that cancelling a DD is a correct way of dealing with an incorrect billing problem.
I think most people would do their best to avoid having their credit histories trashed.