Bad Advice Caused Massive Phone Bill

jraff

Hi all,

I recently had a credit card bill that was due for payment, but I was abroad (in the Philippines).

I tried to pay multiple times using my Natwest Current account and there was an error with their Visa Secure system.
imgur .com/o9fXrZr
(apparently I'm not allowed to post links, so have added a space)

I contacted @Natwest_Helps on twitter, and they advised me that the only way to pay it would be by calling them and speaking to their fraud department to resolve whatever this error is. I was hesitant to do it because I didn't want to face the charges of an international call, but after speaking to them, it seemed like the only way to resolve it and the bill had to be paid that day, so I went ahead and called.

imgur .com/6px19Ss
imgur. com/sBdivUk

After spending about 6-7 minutes on hold, I got cut off because I hit the additional spending cap on my ID mobile SIM. This call had cost me £69 and nothing had been resolved.

I went back to @Natwest_Helps and asked them is there absolutely no alternative method to pay this bill, and they informed me that I can do it via online baking as normal payment.
:wall:

Is there any kind of compensation I can pursue for this huge phone bill I've incurred due to their negligent advice, or am I just out of luck?

Any help would be greatly appreciated, cheers.

DCFC79

Cant answer your question but why was a DD not setup for the credit card ?
It could directly pull the funds from the current account.

jraff

I have a direct debit set up for the minimum payment, I wanted to clear the rest of the balance.

eDicky

Surely you must have realised the time it would take on the line, even if getting to speak to someone, and the roaming charges involved. And there are cheap eats to call, Skype, Viber etc. Also it's well known that online banking can be used to pay a CC bill.

Anyway, try using their formal complaints procedure to carefully outline what happened and the result of the advice (perhaps arising from a misunderstanding between you and the rep), asking for the Twitter conversation to be looked at, if that's possible.

18cc

Um, the ID Mobile site is very helpful and clearly (couldn't be clearer) says that calls to the UK from the Philippines cost £6/minute

Why on earth do you think NatWest should pay your phone bill?

knightfox

jraff wrote: »

I have a direct debit set up for the minimum payment, I wanted to clear the rest of the balance.

Was there a real need to pay off the balance.

I get that its cheaper to pay the balance but credit cards are just that.

Emily_Joy

The NatWest customer service is notoriously unhelpful, nevertheless, they certainly didn't insist on you calling them from your mobile?

SuperHan

Surely at £6 per minute, you knew the interest costs would be less than the call costs (even it were the only way to resolve it).


You have a duty to mitigate your losses, I'm not sure you have.


That said, I imagine they'll bung you at least £50 for the inconvenience and mis-advice, regardless of the quantum of your losses, so it's worth a complaint.

trex227

Granted you could have called them in a cheaper way but nevertheless they did ask you to call them.

If I were you I would be making a complaint to them. We made a complaint to them a few years back regarding having to take ID into 4 different branches on 7 separate occasions as part of our mortgage application (6 different members of staff were unable to follow their own head offices instructions!).

Within a few days we had a call offering £180 to close the complaint, which we accepted.

Although I don’t think they’ll offer more than what the call cost I’d think the chances of getting all or some of the call costs covered would be worth spending 10 mins writing a complaint.

Kentish_Dave

Similarly I was told that the best way to deal with an issue was in-branch. As I was monitoring the experiments at CERN at the time me leaving to fly to London caused a quench in the main magnet of my experiment and did over a billion pounds of damage.

As it turned out that I could have used phone banking should NatWest pay to have the detector rebuilt?

Flobberchops

As SuperHan says: make the complaint, there's an odds-on chance they'll throw money at you to make you go away.


On a personal note, was the tropical paradise of the Philippines really so dull that you felt compelled to spend your trip sorting out the minutia of your credit card billing arrangements? Would it really, truly not have waited until you had returned to the drizzly, slate-grey climes of Blighty? The mind boggles!