O2 Nightmare Service (or complete lack thereof)

JSF79

Two years ago (this coming December 17th) my wife and I took out a contract with O2 for a Sony Xperia Z1 Compact phone and airtime over 24 months as a christmas present for my wifes mum. As this is coming up for renewal and we thought it would be nice to get my mother-inlaw a new phone for christmas I started looking at my options. Quite by chance I found a breakdown of my most recent bill and found that £30 had been for 'Premium Services'.


Now I know you should always check your bill, but i don't and I was hardly going to deny a 74 year old woman her phone for the sake of a few pounds anyway. But this development bothered me so I looked deeper: It then emerged that two numbers had been sending my mother-inlaw texts several times a week for the last few months, sometimes every day, and they had been charging her (or us) £3.75 for each text. Hence the bill. A quick Google confirmed the numbers to be part of a known scam that didn't even require the user to subscribe, just to look at the wrong thing on FaceBook.


Here's where the real nightmare starts: I contacted O2 via Live Chat and was told by the nice lady this was my mother inlaws fault as she should be more careful when surfing the web. I pointed out that they only needed to look at her data usage to know she didn't really surf and that her sole use for the phone was to take pictures and post them on FB. Again, it was not O2's fault and there was nothing they could do. I pointed out that they had facilitated this travesty and been complicit in allowing it on their network and asked if I could Google it, why couldn't they and protect their customers as a result?


I then asked for all premium services to be barred from the phone and was told they could not do this. As I was now fairly unhappy (while accepting that other networks were probably no better) I asked to give notice to end my contract at the date stated in my agreement (December 17th) and was then asked if they could do anything to change my mind. They proceeded to offer a series of renewal packages which were all dearer than I could obtain after a two minute search of the web.


They then offered more deals but as I had now been 'chatting' for FIVE HOURS(!!) I declined and said I would need to think about things and call back. Which I did today.


After another THREE HOURS of Live Chat we are now at this position: O2 will cancel my contract but only issue my PAC number if I pay an early termination fee of £11.50. Because it is now 33 days and not 30 days before December 17th if I serve notice now they will NOT issue a PAC number.


The question(s) I have are this: how in this day and age can a company deny their responsability in companies using the O2 network to scam people out of hundreds of pounds? How can they be so difficult to deal with and still get customers? How can they demand that I spend more time to comply with rules that they've made up?


And finally, who do I complain to?


I have taken screen shots of most of the conversations I had so that I've got a record and am deeply, deeply unhappy with the behaviour of O2. Thoughts and suggestions?


John.

Frozen_up_north

I only have direct experience of Three, who do have a basic "all or nothing" out of bundle spending limit that the customer can turn on or off themselves. It should stop any chargeable event in its tracks.

Some of the other networks have blocks on premium rate numbers and texts. I would terminate the contract at 30 days and ask for the PAC.

Be wary of contracts that include a phone, they are usually for 2 years and that's a long time. SIM only gives greater flexibility.

C_Mababejive

My best advice to you is keep all records of conversations and screen chats. Check your credit profile on noddle for the forthcoming months in case they raise a default. They have what i believe is an aggresive retentions policy in which they desperately try their best to prevent you from leaving.
They should be fined by the regulator IMHO