Vodafone

LizHaze

New here...the official Vodafone thread looks to date back to 2016.  So should I follow its advice and contact Ofcom and WRT?  Or ask for help here?

happy to do whichever is correct.

thanks

JJ_Egan

For what ??  give us a clue .

LizHaze

Sure.  I took out a 24 month contract with mobiles.co.uk for a Vodafone iphone for my granddaughter.  (Ironically recommended here, my go-to source of info).  I paid it for the 24 months.  The phone was dropped often enough to make it useless, so in late 2019 I started looking to upgrade/renew.  Because I’d made the contract with mobiles.co.uk that’s where I looked.  I could find nothing about renewing, so I made a new contract with mobiles.co.uk, this time for an EE phone.  

I looked at every piece of info I’d been given in 2017 (all by email).  There was nothing about cancelling the existing contract.  So I stopped the DD.

The next thing I hear is in March - a call from debt collectors Ardent saying I owed two months worth of payments to Vodafone.  I rang them and they wanted all sorts of personal info.  I assumed it was some kind of scam because I’d never heard of the company and I didn’t owe any money - I’d paid my 24 months...and surely if I owed Vodafone, Vodafone would have been in touch?

Fast forward.  Letters, emails, online chat.  Vodafone are now saying that I had to give them a months notice in order to cancel the contract, even though they didn’t tell me this until now.  But they won’t accept the month’s notice now until I pay £130 in “arrears”.

I am stuck.  Clearly Vodafone expect me to keep paying for this contract until I die, even though the phone hasn’t been used since December.  Yes I have been naive - I’ve been getting all my tech from the phone co-op, who are an entirely different kettle of fish, clear, consistent, honest.

i have read, and re-read the documentation - nothing about cancelling.  I only dealt with mobiles.co.uk, never Vodafone. I don’t mind paying a month for cancelling for my own stupidity in thinking 24 months = 24 months, but the arrears are bogus and outrageous.

Help!

LizHaze

PS I should add that my granddaughter has to have a phone, no choice, and the phone co-op, brilliant as they are, have stopped doing iPhones.

JJ_Egan

Original contract as all of them do moved to a rolling 30 day contract .You cancel at the end of contract by contacting Vodafone .So it rolled on month by month and accrued debt .

Note she does not have to have an IPhone its a choice you make on model and cost .

Plenty of suppliers of IPhone  from contracts to PAYG .

mnbvcxz

Did she move her phone number from the old SIM to the new one using a pac code?

stragglebod

Vodafone don't expect you to keep paying until you die. They expect you to keep paying until you cancel the contract.

If you're grown up about it and ask nicely they might wipe off some of the arrears if they can see there's been no usage. But if you get arsey and start threatening them with Ofcom I doubt they'd be so generous.

Neil49

mnbvcxz said:

Did she move her phone number from the old SIM to the new one using a pac code?

You beat me to it. 

If the number had been transferred to the new account then the old account would have been terminated automatically. 

LizHaze

No, she didn’t move her number.  Because I wasn’t able to find out who to contact and she needed a new phone immediately for Reasons.

i haven’t been anything other than courteous with either Vodafone or the debt collectors.  I am trying to cancel my contract but they won’t let me unless I pay these “arrears”.  Happy to pay for one month (£32) but not £130...

LizHaze

Nowhere in any of the documentation I was given does it say that I needed to cancel the contract.  I have read it and re-read it.

LizHaze

The kind of phone my granddaughter has is not the issue here.  I am happy to admit that I have been naive and pay a reasonable financial penalty.  But this is unreasonable, and I was hoping to get some guidance about negotiating a way out.