The old Bill shock chesnut

martintr

Hi There

I am currently in a dispute with vodafone and am being bullied and stonewalled. I would be very grateful for any advice and help on the old issue of bill shock.

Here's the deal:
I have been a vodafone customer for around 20 years with an impeccable credit record and a steady usage. I currently hold three contracts with them and expect charges of around £180 - £200 a month. My November bill was £967.

What happened?
My son (aged 18), who was significant learning difficulties, went to kenya in October to work in an orphanage. Because we naturally are especially concerned about him I let him take his vodafone SIM with clear instructions that he only put it in his phone in emergencies. We told him how to buy a local phone / SIM which he did.

About three weeks into his trip, during a skype conversation, he said something that made me suspicious. I checked my vodafone account and saw zero usage for texts, calls and data. Good lad thinks I. I continue to monitor the account until another call raises my suspicions again. To double check I clicked on 'current bill' and it only showed the previous month so, to be absolutely sure I called them.

I was told that I owed them nothing, to which I replied that this wasn't possible as I clearly owed them at least the contract fee. After much further discussion I began to understand a serious semantic issue - one that may particularly be understood by agents who do not have English as their first language. It turned out that I owed them over £900 but crucially, as the bill had not been issued there was nothing DUE. Owing and due and NOT the same thing.

I immediately put a bar on my son's SIM and burrowed deeper into the problem. Turns out he didn't realise that not using his phone didn't extend to texts - 1190 of them in total which accounted for £750 of charges.

On discovering this nasty shock I wrote to Vodafone (22/11/15) laying out my argument that because my account showed zero usage and showed nothing owing I had not been given sufficient opportunity to stop these charges before they reached this ridiculous level.

I received an acknowledgement of my letter a few days later just saying they would be in touch. Mindful of the fact that I have a credit agreement with them I called up to make it clear that I wasn't refusing to pay but that I was disputing the bill. They agreed that I should take out a delayed payment agreement which required 10% payment with the balance due in a month. They confidently said that they would be in touch within 20 days - well within the limit of the agreement. Two days later I checked my bank account just in time to stop them taking the full amount - totally contrary to what had been agreed.

Today - two days before Christmas and having heard nothing I called again. Clearly no progress had been made on my formal complaint but the agent offered me extended payment terms - stating that (in his words) "not one penny would be reduced from the bill". I have asked that the process be started whereby I can escalate the complaint.

Apologies for the length of this post but I wanted all the facts down. There is, perhaps, one salient point left. The charges were available on my account but hidden under a deep link called 'itemised usage > out of package charges'. Now tell me, if you arrive at a screen that says: Texts: 0, Calls: 0. Data: 0. Why on earth would you proceed to 'itemised usage'? In short, why would you want to have ZERO itemised?

Bottom line, fellow consumers, do I have a leg to stand on? Did Vodafone have a duty to inform me that my bill was running way beyond normal usage or do they really have a free hand to charge what they damn well please and then throw your contract at you?

My father - a lawyer – always used to say to me that if something feels against the law then it usually is. Man, does this feel wrong.

jem16

martintr wrote: »

Apologies for the length of this post but I wanted all the facts down. There is, perhaps, one salient point left. The charges were available on my account but hidden under a deep link called 'itemised usage > out of package charges'. Now tell me, if you arrive at a screen that says: Texts: 0, Calls: 0. Data: 0. Why on earth would you proceed to 'itemised usage'? In short, why would you want to have ZERO itemised?

Your usage is shown just as any mobile bill/current usage that I have seen. The texts, calls and data with 0 refer to what has been used from your included package.

Unfortunately International texts are not included and would be shown in another section. Sometimes it can even take a few days for them to show up.

Bottom line, fellow consumers, do I have a leg to stand on?

I can't see that you do I'm afraid. The costs were incurred by your son albeit unwittingly.

Did Vodafone have a duty to inform me that my bill was running way beyond normal usage or do they really have a free hand to charge what they damn well please and then throw your contract at you?

Some companies may inform you and others would not. If you really want to not go above a certain limit then a Capped contract from the likes of Tesco Mobile would have been much better for your son. In the end though, the charges are valid.

My father - a lawyer – always used to say to me that if something feels against the law then it usually is. Man, does this feel wrong.

It's certainly not against the law and the most you could really hope for is for some reduction due to goodwill.

martintr

Hi Jem and thanks for taking the time to reply.

I respect you completely but your opinion not at all!

Your comments rather smack of being some kind of insider or at least a vodafone apologist. Highly suspicious if I may say. I'm not a fool and I believe I have a case. Having charges 'show up in some other section' (your words) is wholly unacceptable. The Consumer Rights Act 2015 says "the key terms of a contract, including price, may be assessed for fairness unless they’re both prominent and transparent." Putting off-contract charges behind a deep link and making three 'zeroes' the headline figure on the homepage of you account is neither prominent nor transparent.

Further more - when you call to find out how much you owe and are told 'nothing', as stated in my original post, why would you continue to check itemised charges. This call will have been recorded and is evidence of how I was misled.

martintr

For good measure - I quote from 'UK Mobile Operators’ Code of Practice on Consumer Billing. March 2015"

Out of bundle charges
The signatories (which includes Vodafone) of this Code commit to:

• providing information to customers on their spending through clear bills , setting out the costs associated with services.
• providing clear and transparent pricing regarding out of bundle charges.
• advising of products or services that are available to help managing costs - such as allowance bolt-ons’
• providing customers with the capabilities to obtain accurate and timely information about
the level of their spend, including alerts when they are reaching their data bundle limits or capabilities to monitor usage and thus manage their monthly spend.

I don't believe Vodafone have complied with any of the above in my case.

jem16

martintr wrote: »

Your comments rather smack of being some kind of insider or at least a vodafone apologist.

I have no connection with Vodafone either as an insider or even a customer.

Did you actually want comments or are you going to accuse everyone that disagrees with you of somehow being connected to Vodafone?

martintr

I'm sorry Jem - I tried to choose my words carefully - I admit to being a little OTT with the 'connected to Vodafone' comments - I wasn't seriously suggesting you were. I tried to acknowledge the fact that you had taken the trouble to reply but at the end of the day I just didn't agree with you.

One has to be sensitive in forums - the dissociative nature of them can lead to extraordinary rudeness. I really didn't mean to offend you. In the same way as one has to be gracious in receiving replies the respondent must equally gracious if the answers don't go down well.

In my defence your comments I felt were somewhat abrupt, dismissive even. Reading them a felt a little foolish for even having thought to ask which is why my response was a tad knee jerk. I should have remembered to breath!

I really did appreciate you taking the time but I still reserve the right not to agree!

Let's see how I get on.

tomtontom

If you continue to complain then Vodafone will no doubt agree to a reduced payment, but you (and your son) need to accept responsibility for running up the bill. It's not Vodafone that is at fault here, is it?

(And no, I don't work for Vodafone either!)

Ian011

The fact that the details of significant additional charges that can, and in this case did, run to hundred of pounds are hidden behind an additional link on a page that suggests that there will be nothing to see if the link is clicked, suggests that you have been misled. I would expect to see a monetary figure clearly shown and then further details when the link is clicked. If you were also verbally advised that the additional charges were 'zero' when they were already at several hundred pounds or more, you appear to have been misled twice.

Communication with a phone provider should not need you to use a very particular phraseology in order to get the answer you so clearly wanted and went out of your way to seek on more than one occasion. You don't appear to have been treated either fairly or reasonably. If the agent was staring at a screen that showed your next bill was already going to be hundreds of pounds more than usual, but failed to mention it, especially given the nature of your enquiry, they appear to have been negligent. Failure to understand your question is their fault, not yours.

Drop a line to BBC Watchdog and BBC You and Yours for starters and then fight Vodafone all the way. Sure, there's a contract you signed, but there's also what's fair and reasonable - and this isn't.

Love2bone

Your son was sending text messages abroad, your contract clearly didn't allow for such texts. In reality, you owe them money but seem to be trying to get out of it.

Ian011

Imagine putting your card behind the bar and agreeing five hundred quid max for the tab, and later on asking how much had been spent so far. If the barman told you four hundred, but failed to mention that someone had just ordered two bottles of two hundred quid vintage and that he was just about to go and get them, you would rightly kick off when presented with a nearly thousand pound bill at the end of the night.

martintr

All very interesting thanks folks.

A combination between brutal and sympathetic advice.

For what it's worth - for those whose line is 'you spent the money, man up and pay up', it is a matter of record with Vodafone that I am not refusing to pay. All I am asking for is a dialogue about whether I had a reasonable opportunity to control the charges. I don't think I did (thanks Ian, above).

Looking around the internet I'm not alone - bill shock is a very real issue and if we all just roll over when this happens then mobile operators, inter alia, will go on charging what they like when they like. Clearly they have to weed out those people who wittingly run up big bills and then cry foul (love2bone), but there's a very significant number of people who get caught out. In this case past history would seem to be a good guide – for twenty years my bills have been pretty much a straight line on a graph. Against this November was a massive spike. Vodafone have to accept that something went wrong here and have a sensible dialogue.

Once again - let's see how I get on.