Virgin Mobile Grrr… Things to know to protect your mobile…
Okay so here’s some lessons we learnt from experience the other week – following the lessons is the background story which explains the lessons a bit more …
- Try to keep tabs on your phone, especially if you don’t use it regularly
- Find out what the credit limit the the provider has set for themselves on your account, for their purposes and have it reduced if it’s way more than you spend.
- If your phone is stolen and your provider wants to lay all the call costs on you – use whatever you can to argue against it, including cancelling your custom with them if possible (you’ll likely get a reduction, if not the whole costs wiped)
- If you have mobile insurance, make sure you keep your provider up to date about any changes in your circumstances such as address and if you change handsets
- If your phone as a pin capability use it – okay some people can crack them, but the opportunistic theif might not be able to… Yeah it makes calling clunky but better than than a £200 bill!
The background…
The other week my partner went out one evening and lost/had stolen, his mobile phone. I say lost and then stolen in that he didn’t come home with it and then we found out a bill of £220 had been racked up on it! The problem is he didn’t realise until 7pm the day after that his phone wasn’t around. So we dilligently rang Virgin Mobile, got the sim blocked, ordered a new one and thought no more of it. Bad move! The new sim arrived and I rang to activate it – I was told this couldn’t be done until we’d paid of the balance owing as it was over its limit. This is when I found out about the 220 quid! As people who normally only use our 300mins/300texts £10/month allowances or thereabouts - you can imagine the shock. Moreover, noone had told me about this bill and it would have been taken as a direct debit from my bills account! As I put around the right amount of money in the bills account every month, had I not found out about this transaction (and shoved more money in) this would have taken me overdrawn on that account and incurred further charges. I do get emails notifying me of my latest bill, but (I suppose foolishly on my part I don’t check them as I know how little I spend on my phone). You’d think that when we reported the phone stolen, or a few days after Virgin could have informed us? Thanks Virgin!
Anyway, the poor call centre operator had to tell me that we were liable for all of the charges incurred before the phone had been blocked. Actually she also told me that the original operator hadn’t blocked the phone and it had been used after so she would deduct that (all 7 quid of it – whooppee!). To cut a long story short, I aruged this was unreasonable and that they were profiting from the mistfortune of others. She essentially said they weren’t, it was policy and that they had to protect themselves from those customers who racked up astronomical bills themselves and tried to pass it off as a case of a stolen phone! I pointed out that there really should be saftey procedures put in place in much the same way as credit card companies do (I can’t count the times my credit card has been refused because I forgot to tell my provider I’d be hopping between countries or making a few big purchases!). I didn’t wash… Indeed to rub salt in the wound, she said we were lucky it had been stopped at that as the saftey measure for Virgin had kicked in at £200. That is, they blocked the phone at around £227 because ‘we’d’ gone over our limit. Apparently, this info is on my direct debit agreement - I only know this as I asked why I wasn’t told about this, because, had I been, we would automatically have had very low limits set as a protection at the beginning of our contracts given we spend so little on mobile communications. In terms of any possible fraud on our part – I suggested they looked back at the account history in terms of numbers dialled, numbers of calls within particular periods etc and see how these marry up the spending spree over 18 hours which amounted to around £227. They weren’t having it, even though they could tell me there’d been a stream of overseas calls (now we do know people overseas of course – but we have MSN and Skype too!). They told us to call the police – which we have, but we doubt anything will happen as they told my partner that mobile phone companies rarely pursue cases such as this (so why did Virgin even bother telling us to report it to the police – wasting ours and their time).
After I kicked up a fuss and said I’d pull our TV, Internet and Mobile business the call centre person said they’d speak to a manager and get back to me the next day. True to her word she did, and said, actually, they’d got it wrong and our credit limit was £150 and even though the bill was over 200, as a gesture of good will they would only make us acocuntable for that. I said it wasn’t a gesture of good will and that they were only implementing the credit limt… Wrong again! I was told the credit limit is there to protect Virgin, not the the consumer!
Anyway, luckily for us we thought, my partner also has mobile insurance with Lloyds TSB… Wrong! When he called them, they checked which handset he’d lost… The one that was registered stopped working and so he was using a different handset and hadn’t told them – that was their out and they said they wouldn’t pay up!
It’s nice to know that in times when customers are not gonna have much money flying around, there are still companies out there willing to profit from you – however they can…