Warning: Problems with Smarty referral process

Diccondp

This is more of a Public Service Announcement really but I recently moved myself, my wife and my two children to Smarty for mobile contracts in order to take advantage of their £10 each referral reward, effectively £60 free, by me creating the first account, then referring the others. I have an @gmail.com account and take advantage of the use of '+' addresses to create sub account for managing any accounts relating to my children because I am paying the bills and dont want them to have access directly to their accounts and cause financial changes.

TLDR: If you utilise the Gmail feature of using + to create multiple accounts then the £10 referral links will be merged between all of those accounts and it will likely fail to track properly.

I had previously had a Smarty account back in early 2020 for 2 months, this was for a data only SIM for an elderly aunt to use for internet MiFi after moving house and waiting for new broadband to be activated, this account had been created as notmyemail+something@gmail.com account.

Roll on to a few weeks ago I created my Smarty account as notmyemail@gmail.com, activated, transferred my mobile number and all working well.

Then I used the referral URL from my account and signed up my wife under her email address (nothing related to gmail). The referral URL webpage shows a 'Diccon has referred you etc' and after signing up her name showed up in my account referrals tracker.

So then I created accounts for my children as notmyemail+child1name@gmail.com and notmyemail+child2name@gmail.com and did the referral just as I did with my wife. The web browsers both showed the header banner at account creation stating it was a referral however I did not get the referral confirmation emails once their accounts got created.

I opened a web chat was was assured by Smarty that they understand the issue and to just come back to them after the 14 day required referral wait period and they will sort out the referral payments.

Well! I have just finished 2 hours of conversation and I am being told I issued the referral URL from the old and deactivated notmyemail+something@gmail.com account. After going back and forth over the 2 hours explaining I could not have done that without logging in to the old account I did some research and I have found out that by using multiple browsers to log in to each of the notmyemail+whatever@gmail.com accounts that even thought each of them show different accounts and payment history etc - the referral page all show exactly the same details - the URL is the same, and the status page for every account shows my wife!

To clarify, this is obviously a bit of an edge case, I manage the bills in the house and therefore feed all the accounts back to me but it appears that the Smarty systems specifically handling the referral tracking is unable to see the difference between multiple + email addresses.

The support assistant was adamant it was my fault and I used the URL from the older deactivated account and therefore will not be paid. After explaining their problem with their referral system I was told at best they could provide me with £10 credit to my account and then £10 to each of the children accounts. Whilst that is good it is still £10 short of what I should be getting. They were unable to escalate any further and only suggested that I could move the accounts away, and then create new accounts and come back again - obviously that would cost money moving to a new provider let alone the effort at moving / new SIMs / PAC transfers all x 2!

So my next stop is probably the comms ombudsman but not sure if it is worth it.

Just wanted to advise anyone thinking of doing similar that you should use completely different email accounts for all your family members.

cdturri

Thanks this post answered my two questions, whether I can use SMARTY refer a friend with Gmail aliases (no) and famility members at the same address (yes). Thank you for taking the time to post.