My 14 year old brother has made 250£+ charges to my bill that I am being forced to pay

[xaleksas]

Hi everyone. Woke up this morning to my phone services being turned off with a bunch of messages from Vodafone regarding unusually high usage for this month. Checked my bill in the apl and I have 250£+ additional charges for calls made to premium number!! Contacted supported, turns out these phone calls were made at night when I was sleeping. Confronted my brother about this, checked his gaming accounts and it's obvious it's his doing. Vodafone support has turned my services back on however I'm still being asked to pay these charges as the calls were made even though they were unauthorized. The thing is I live of benefits and all I get is 608£ a month, I was offered a payment plan for 6 months with each month being 58£ added to my bill which is still way above what I can afford. What are my options? I've done some research and found that a lot of other operators like O2 and EE are removing these charges for their customers given that they were unauthorized. Really lost and stressed out, any help appreciated! Thank you

[AnnS]

This could easily have been prevented by making sure you had the premium rate restriction bar enabled on your account, adding Spend Manager here Spend Manager  and keeping the phone safely in your possession with as much added security to prevent unauthorised use the phone offers as possible @xaleksas 

The problem is Vodafone will have the calls registered against the phone IMEI number and these will be charged by the premium rate service.

However, no harm asking the question, drop the Social Team a message by following this link: Contact Us 

To add @xaleksas avoid a payment plan if possible, this will be reported on your credit file as a warning to other creditors and will affect your credit rating.

[arkhamknight02]

Hi there,

Setting up a spending cap is very easy to sort out, you can do this using the Vodafone app, calling customer services, live chat or visiting your local Vodafone shop. 

I have a lot of personal and work experience with various UK mobile service providers both main and MVNO’s and I can say that weather or not your brother made these charges on your phone, it would be very highly unlikely you would have been able to have these charges removed. 

In most cases, your network provider in this case Vodafone would remove the fees if your phone was stolen and used to rack up high fees or if your account was subject of fraudulent use. 

As previous poster recommended, agreeing to a payment plan would weaken your credit in the eyes of potential lenders and maybe a factor that stops you from obtaining credit facilities.