Being charged after £10 freedom freebie expired !

[jimbo1467]

I am a payg customer as you can tell and recently since i havent topped up ( lack of funds ) i have been getting txt`s from you saying i am using data and that you are charging me £2 per day for the privillege. How can you charge me £2 when i am a payg customer and since my freedom freebie has run out ( 24th july 2014 ) you apply a charge that has come off my £10 top-up which incidently i thought i was paying to renew my freedom freebie allowance. I have not said you can charge me outside of my allowance or even signed anything to allow you to do so, I only started getting these txts one week after my freedom freebie ran out, so are you telling me i wasnt using any data in that whole week ? i smell something wrong here, for a start i sense a breach of my data protection, you have no right expecting a casual payg to pay for something he or she was not made aware would happen even though he or she didnt agree to it.
Today 04/08/14 when i topped up straight away it took £2 which meant i couldnt pay for my £10 freedom freebie. So i tried to contact you with chat now but as usual too busy was the reply, so i called 191 ? and spoke to someone called Mpho. He was very rude and didnt understand that since my ff had ran out then how could i be connecting to the web or data transfering, but he kept on insisting i must be, but even though i assured him i had turned off data network. He wouldnt listen so i asked to speak to his supervisor/manager and after some wait he came back and told me his manager would call me back within fifteen to thirty minutes. I`ve now been waiting nearly three hours now for them to call, i suppose they wont call me back. I now still dont have my £10 freedom freebie activated yet but more worringly the thought that you will charge me for using data even though there should be a block on me trying to use it as my ff has run out. It sounds like because your profits are down you will charge anyone on your system to make the shortfall up. This also means anyone with a smart phone and had not topped up in say two months will get this charge even though they thought they didnt have any web access, sounds like fraud and i WILL be taking this further as i and many others thought once your allowance ran out at the end of thirty days that was it, oh no, not to vodafone who secretly keep you online and charge you for it when you eventually to up. 
Is there anyone here that can help as i have become totally dissolutioned with vodafone !

[jimbo1467]

Hi hyrm,

Try leaving it in the phone overnight for two nights if you possibly can ( as vf charge the following 24hrs after you`ve supposedly used it ) Mind you if it hasnt been topped up in a while it might be off the system and wouldnt work anyway. Mine hadnt been topped up in a week then the txts started that i had been using data and that a charge of £2 would be getting levied, strangely enough i got 4 txts saying the same on the 1st, 3rd and two on the 4th of august but when i eventually topped up by ten pound it only took two pound, strange eh,why not the eight pound. I think vf`s systems are totally screwed up and thats why their profits are down, people have had enough, sometimes people cant even give their money to them because the top up system has broken down yet again, its a complete farce.

[hrym]

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@jimbo1467 wrote:

Hi hyrm,

Try leaving it in the phone overnight for two nights if you possibly can

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Done that, as it happened.  Still doing its best impression of the proverbial doornail.  The My Data Manager app shows a few kb as being used, but I think that's just apps sending contact requests and being rebuffed by the network (they get nothing back).

We're all agreed that this is very odd, as the network should simply note that you have no credit and refuse to do anything - the way it's set up, as far as I know, it can only take charges from credit you have (unless you sign up for an IOU and only for the amount of that).

I'm just wondering whether the texts themselves are spurious and that's all?  I assume the phone isn't actually working, in terms of receiving data or being able to make calls - is it?  The other, rather intriguing possibilty, is that the system thinks you have (possibly infinite) credit and is using that!

This is a system thing and one for the Tech Team.  The rest of us can only speculate.

[DaveCD]

Hi jimbo1467.

There's been some great support here and I think the majority of scenarios have been mentioned.

So that we can look into this further, see here for how to get in touch.

We aim to reply to emails within 48 hours. If you need a quicker response, please visit our Contact Us page.

DaveCD

[jimbo1467]

Hi DaveCD

" Majority of scenario`s " 

Still not seen the explanation to the scenario where as a payg vustomer i still get charged even though i have no credit but somehow vf let my mobile send and recieve data, tell me DaveCD are vf always as this generous for the charge of two pounds to the unlucky payg customers who thought they`d ran out of credit thus they cant use their phone. 

Yes i`ll fill in your form so you can try and get to the bottom of this too.

[jimbo1467]

Ahhhh i just an answer and i came up error then i had to click back which wiped everything i had typed grrr.

Hi Annie,

Yes this is certainly a weird one, no i`ve not opted into the £3 loan so how can i be made to be in debt to vf without my consent. No credit and no ff running means you dont get anything right ? wrong, vf find a way to make it look like they are being nice and friendly and letting your phone exchange data even when you arent expecting it then wallop that will be two pound thank you very much. It shouldnt matter what sort of data or app is trying to exchange data because if someone is on pay as you go they know they cant get any service because they havent first paid for it, no credit no data. Like my house phone if i dont pay the bill it gets cut off, i cant make calls, end of, not well we`ll secretly let you use your phone without your knowledge, and only known to them, then they`ll charge me for it without me even know its been used. An absolutely ridiculous situation and i hope it dosent happen to other payg customers because they are being fleeced out of their hard earned.

The " Wifi Only " is in regards to " Application Settings > Sansung Apps > Wifi only ... where i clicked wifi only

Theres also another menu " Accounts and sync > Accounts and sync settings > Background data ... is also unclicked, and they always have been since day one as the guy in carphone wharehouse explained everything about the phone when i was buying it. I walked out that shop knowing everything there was to my phone. I also have a tablet that runs android apps also and i can work that very easily too as its just the same as my phone. But i still cat figure out why vf allowed data transfer even though i had no credit, they had no right to allow data to be transfered.

I hope i have helped you to maybe figure this out now.

P.s Yes your 2nd sentence was correct btw.

[Annie_N]

Hi jimbo1467, and thanks for the detailed response.

The situation you recount sounds weird in the extreme, as it's hard to see what you could have done, beyond what you describe, to be in a non-payment mode! I'll flag it up to the Team for further investigation, as everyone concerned needs to be able to figure this one out. So you should get a follow-up response from one of the Team quite soon.

I have an oldish SIM with 16p of credit on it, which I know to be active, as I made a chargeable use of it in late June, and which definitely hasn't got IOU activated, so I'll pop it into a smartphone that I'm not currently using, charge it up, and see what happens over a few days. I think, from what I know of hrym's experiments with other phones, that the SIM he mentions would still be active - he seems to have been offered an opt-in to IOU, which tends to confirm that.

BTW, those errors which wipe your text are mercifully few and far between, but I have to admit that I've been caught often enough that I tend to copy an elaborate reply to the clipboard before hitting Post. Of course it's when I forget to do that, that the gremlin strikes! Shock, horror, I seem to be heading rapidly for 3000 posts :smileysurprised:

Annie.

[vicvic81]

System errors i think and I've noticed if iv no credit come 12am when the system must be switching i previously have received fb messages/notification and a random text about using data but no further credit took when I've topped up i wouldn't worry, but if credit is took when you next top up that's a different story. Good luck.

[Annie_N]

@jimbo1467 

One further thought, in the light of vicvic81's post: You received two texts on 4th August - was the second of these timed shortly after you had actually topped up?

If the other three texts all arrived just after midnight, then vicvic81's idea that they are just spurious texts generated by having your phone on and crossing into the next charging period would make sense. As hrym describes, your phone tries to make contact, is rebuffed, but it generates a text. However, if you top up, and your phone immediately manages to make contact (it isn't rebuffed, as you are now in funds), then the message shortly afterwards, to say that you are using data and have been charged £2, would be for real. Of course, this assumes that the data switch on your phone is on, when you seem to have found that it is off, which is a complicating factor here. After all, you've had the phone for 2 years, so it seems unlikely that you could have gone that long without triggering a charge for data until now, if the data switch had been on all along.

But, whatever is going on, it would all be a lot easier to make sense of, if the system wasn't apparently generating spurious messages about £2 charges.

[hrym]

Interesting thought, @Annie_N .  My experimental device isn't getting any texts, though. It just sits there with a blank expression on its little face.

[Annie_N]

Something that I'm aware of, @hrym , but that you probably aren't, is that there is a mysterious problem with vicvic81's account, so that the Text & Web Freebee doesn't auto-renew for some reason, and possibly some other problems. It sounds as though the glitch might also be generating some spurious messages relating to data usage.

If the SIM/account that you are using for this test is 100% glitch-free, then it should just be sitting there like a pudding! The only account on which I know that I've got a problem is for my micro-SIM, where the Freebee Data didn't auto-renew, but (a) I need it in a phone I'm currently using, and (b) I've got some credit on it, so if I switch on mobile data it will promptly start using data and generate genuine messages about eating my credit! So I'm planning to experiment using a SIM which came out of a non-smart phone, putting it into a smartphone, and see what, if anything, happens. It has probably led a blameless existence, and nothing will happen, but you never know until you try.