MSE News: Victory! Debt write-off for Vodafone customer who disputed a £10,500 bill

Former_MSE_Megan_F · 6 July 2017 at 11:55AM

A Vodafone customer in dispute over a mobile bill has won a maximum £10,000 ombudsman pay-out and forced the telecoms giant to write off the rest of the debt...

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’Victory! Debt write-off for Vodafone customer who disputed a £10,500 bill'

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VT82 · 6 July 2017 at 2:16PM

Yes, Vodafone ballsed up, but seriously... 200GB of data in one month!? According to Google, that's about 300 hours of iPlayer, or 10 hours a day, every day. What kind of idiot assumed that 10 hours a day of video streaming would be within any kind of contracted amount or cap he thought he had?!?! If you haven't got the app, or any other way to automatically check your usage, you would want to call their free customer services number to check your usage and allowance. Unless that is you are deliberately burying your head in the sand so you can later plead ignorance.

It's right that he's had a big chunk of it written off because of Vodafone's lax practices, but if I was proven to be as dumb as him, I wouldn't want to have my face plastered all over the coverage of this story. And by the way, when you describe yourself as 'loyal' for being with the same mobile company for 25 years, you're not engendering more sympathy with the reader, you're simply making people think all the more that you're plain gullible.

Ian011 · 6 July 2017 at 2:24PM

How the heck did we get to the point where accessing the internet for a month costs more than a CAR?

When buying a car, you have the option of spreading the payments over many years. Vodafone wanted this in one month!

AR2012 · 6 July 2017 at 9:10PM

They call it bill shock and if you want to compare it i had a person who racked up a £3.5k bill using 12gb of gprs somewhere in asia (on leave). thats the worst example of telcos i can think of.

mailmannz · 7 July 2017 at 9:39AM

VT82 wrote: »

It's right that he's had a big chunk of it written off because of Vodafone's lax practices, but if I was proven to be as dumb as him, I wouldn't want to have my face plastered all over the coverage of this story.

The whole issue here is that Vodafone had no controls in place to ensure issues like this would to happen. Thats it right there. No need to delve in to the "what a moron for letting this happen" path because that is neither here nor there.

HAD Vodafone had the appropriate controls in place and actually capped the users data, instead of increasing it which is NOT what he asked for, then this whole matter would not have occurred.

Mailman

phillw · 7 July 2017 at 11:57PM

mailmannz wrote: »

The whole issue here is that Vodafone had no controls in place to ensure issues like this would to happen. Thats it right there. No need to delve in to the "what a moron for letting this happen" path because that is neither here nor there.

How can vodaphone prevent someone from sharing their dongle and use all that data, send someone round with every sim?

Sure he might want there to be a cap on his data usage, but the account didn't have a cap so he should have made other arrangements.

grumbler · 8 July 2017 at 10:07PM

If it's mobile broadband, why on earth the dongle is "WiFi"?
It's simply unbelievable how the same error can spread unnoticed from one article to another...

phillw · 10 July 2017 at 7:39AM

grumbler wrote: »

If it's mobile broadband, why on earth the dongle is "WiFi"?
It's simply unbelievable how the same error can spread unnoticed from one article to another...

Is it one of those 3G powered Wi-Fi hotspots? He shared it with his friends, which seems more reasonable with a hotspot than one of the USB dongles.

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MSE News: Victory! Debt write-off for Vodafone customer who disputed a £10,500 bill

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