Vodafone poor advice

waynesbar

I spoke to Vodafone on Saturday on behalf of my child. They have lost their job and before getting into financial difficulties they have decided to move in with their partners parents. They have given up their rented house, cancelled their bills and are trying to get themselves new jobs and some money behind themselves before renting again.

Now they tried to cancel their broadband contract with Vodafone, to be told by the person on the phone and then the line manager confirmed the following advice. You need to cancel your direct debit and fall into arrears we will asign your account to a debt recovery company once you are in arrears. Once this happens you will get a CCJ, once you have a CCJ we can look at helping you by reducing your cancelation fees. On top of this poor financial advice that would destroy the credit files of the young people it would impact on future credit, future contracts, future borrowing and future ability to rent of a number of years. Not only this but they have a venerability mark due to their mental health. This is not what Vodafone told OFCOM was their procedure looking on line you can see what Vodafone purported was their policy for vulnerable users. Fortunately we spoke to the life event team that were much more helpful and waved the cancellation fee.

My question who else has received poor advise and should we raise a complaint to stop such poor advice being given out in the future.

Woodstok2000

So Vodafone sorted it out to your satisfaction?

Brie

Definitely raise a complaint! Be polite, keep it simple, try not to be too emotional, just state the facts. Include date, time, who was talked to if possible.

From a debt advice perspective what should happen is that the account would fall into arrears and an agreement would be made to repay over a certain length of time. There is no reason that it should become a CCJ unless the customer (your child) did not engage at all and give no explanation of the problem.

If there is mental health issues either prior to this or resulting from the job loss and mounting debt your child might be helped by getting a Debt & Mental Health Evidence Form filled out by their medical professional. If they are in England the doctor is not allowed to charge for doing this despite what some surgery staff might say.

Meanwhile I'll move this to the phone forum as that might get a more meaningful response for you.

Link to DMHEF - see point 9

DFW Sticky-Provit/Statute Barred Letters, Defaults, Mental Health Help and Guidance, all here. — MoneySavingExpert Forum

waynesbar

yes Vodafone sorted it to our satisfaction. My point is should we complain so other users don't get such poor advice. It may be a training issue, but such poor advice could financially hurt someone and their credit file. Especially as both the missed payments and the CCJ will now go in their credit file.

Isthisforreal99

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82038373#Comment_82038373

Personally I'd just get on with life.

Most finance/loan providers will tell you they can't help until an amount is defaulted. Seems you actually got a better than expected result (eventually). If you really want a 'lessons have been learnt' go away letter then by all means......

iniltous

It seems odd advice, but I suspect the conversation leading up-to that bad advice also needs to be provided.

I’d have thought anyone in that position (basically leaving and presumably liable for early termination charges ) simply gets told that asking to leave in these circumstances will get a final invoice including the early termination charge, you pay that and move on , not advised to default on the final payment etc and go though some tortuous process to get some debt relief, however if the conversation was more along the lines of ‘we need to leave and can’t afford to pay anything especially not early termination charges ’ then the advice although poor was probably simply trying to offer a way to ultimately pay less ( it turned out to be bad advice in that you somehow managed to get the ETC waived , this presumably is a rare outcome)

I suspect this bad advice isn’t offered to everyone wanting to quit completely, it was possibly just the representative trying to offer a way that reduced terms could be offered once the account becomes delinquent and ‘recovery’ try to get some of debt paid when the customer says they can’t afford early termination charges ….clearly the first representative wasn’t authorised to waive the termination charges , the way the later VF staff could .