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 !

[Annie_N]

Well, I seem to have achieved a “result” of a sort. I eventually located the old SIM that I’m aiming to let go, with just 22p credit on it, but still active, as it was used late June.

I popped it into my second-string smartphone, switched on mobile data during the evening, and awaited developments. By about 10pm I could see from my data counter that some data had been used. Then I thought of something else that I wanted to investigate, and came to browse the Forum using mobile data. The forum isn’t chargeable for Vodafone customers, even if they’re out of credit and data. As I live in a poor signal area, it was unbearably slow going, but I was able to connect to the Forum, though not to anywhere else that I tried to visit. Then at about 11pm I received a text saying “We’ve spotted that you’re using data. This means you’ll pay £2 a day for upto 50MB and 10p a MB after that. etc etc”

Now I know that nothing I did could be chargeable, as I wasn’t able to make a chargeable connection. As the phone and the data switch were on, the phone kept trying to connect, but as there wasn’t enough credit to take the required £2, I wasn’t able to get to chargeable pages. However, I did ratchet up 2150KB of usage, partly on being rebuffed, but also on visiting the forum, and it looks as though that level of usage was enough to trigger the text message, although the content of the message wasn’t correct.

I’ve left the data switched on continuously since then, and have apparently used 1730KB of data so far today, but no further text message has arrived. I’ll keep things running for another couple of days, and see whether I get any further texts.

Of course, I’ll then be a bit stuck on what to do next, as I have absolutely no wish to top that SIM up ever again – I have more than enough other SIMs to contend with. So, unless I can think up some very clever scheme, my experiment may have run into the sand!

[jimbo1467]

Hi Annie,

Thanks for your endevours in trying to sort this.

Right, my freebie ran out on 25th of july, i had no credit at all on my account, no balance, zilch.

On the 1st of august at 11.52am i recieved the " we`ve spotted that your using data ... blah blah blah "

Then again on the 3rd of august at 9.13am the same txt.

Then again on the 4th of august at 9.56am same again, then 4mins later the same again at 9.57am

Later that day at 16.36 i topped up by my usual ten pounds then noticed it had dropped down to eight pound almost instantaneously. Luckily i didnt need my phone that day ( i am my partners carer and because of her condition i need a phone, and luckily i have my home phone for when i know vf will make either topping up or something else making my mobile a paperweight )

I eventually got to speak to someone on " live chat " a day or two later and explained it all to them and they put my ten pound freebie on, what a relief. But i still want to know why vf will put me in debt to them even though i have no credit so even though my phone was trying to get online vf would allow that so that it could txt me saying they will charge me for something i have no money in the first instance for, and no i am still not opted in for the £3 credit, if i were after having so many txts wouldnt it have taken more than two pounds it should have taken eight pounds right. I dont want to belong to a company that will secretly charge me when i dont first agree to it.

[vicvic81]

So you got charged for data and money took when you had topped up? Think that is a case for tech team as my theory of random non relevant texts from Vodafone is not the case, good luck jimbo1467 hope you shed some light on your query.

[jimbo1467]

Hi vic,

Yes i was charged for data even though i had no credit, then when i topped up by ten pounds my balance was reduced to eight pounds almonst immediately. Why only the two pounds, why not eight pounds as i had already had four txts from other days saying the same thing. 

I feel like i`m saying the same thing over and over again and again.

How are vf letting my mobile connect to anything when i have no credit. When your electricity runs out, whilst your using the key to top up your meter, they dont let any electricity through for you to use then tell you oh we see you`ve used some electricity so we`re going to bill you for two pound.
I didnt have any credit in the first place for the mobile so it shouldnt be able to conect to anything apart from my home wifi.

[Annie_N]

But there is a complication here, which is that Vodafone lets you browse the Forum and (I think) some of the Support pages without charge. I was definitely able to do that while using the SIM with no credit or data, but the minute I tried to access another page, like the Vodafone shop, or one of the BBC pages, I got an error report, generated by the phone, saying that the page in question was unavailable or had moved.

So "data" isn't a seamless whole - it's divided into chargeable and non-chargeable. I was only able to visit non-chargeable pages, but I did clock up a fair amount of non-chargeable usage, and that seemed to generate the text telling me that I was using data. However, whichever sort of area your phone was getting to, the fact that you were getting that message suggests that you may have had the mobile data switch on. If it was on, and then you topped up, the block on getting to chargeable areas would immediately be removed, and you would then be at risk of getting charged £2 for the day on which you topped up.

If I could top up by as small a sum as £2, I'd be willing to experiment further. But with the minimum being £5, I'm afraid I have to draw the line on the search for knowledge!

[jimbo1467]

Did you forget about my home wifi ?

Thats still beside the point no credit, no balance no right to the web then ? and if not then why not inform me i would get charged if my mobile tries to connect ( outside my home wifi ) to the web, instead of not letting anything through because I`M NOT IN CREDIT !

Now i`ve had mail from VCS to provide details of : 

·         Last top up: date, time and amount

·         Activation date of SIM

·         Last interaction with Vodafone (except this email, eForum, twitter,facebook) 

Ha, how am i to remember when the sim was activated, unbelievable.

Plus it says " I tried to call you " yeah well fix your systems and maybe the phone will work. Sometimes when i`m out and try to call home, i cant make any calls at all and i need to turn the phone off and on, nothing to do with the phone it just cant connect to the network even outside.

I can see this is going to rumble on for months, so i will be going elsewhere asap, cant be having a network trying to steal from me for something that shouldnt happen in the first place.

[Retired-Matt_B]

Hi jimbo1467,

If you don't know the information, reply telling us in the email and we can ask another question.

Alternatively, reply with a time and alternative number and we can arrange a call back when it's convenient for you.

Thanks,

Matt B

[vicvic81]

Your so right jimbo something not right about it, hope you get an explanation and your money compensated good luck.

[vicvic81]

You always make sense Annie......