jimbob202002:

Because i work on a goverment contract i reported this to the police and got an incident number which i provided to vodafone, vodafone agreed to give me 50% of the bill if i didnt take my complaint to ofcom, but as i did take it to ofcom they have asked me to pay the full bill.

Vodafone as any other mobile phone company have services in place to detect unusual activity on a mobile phone account, when i asked them about this service and why it didnt pick up my account i was told " we have millions of customers we cant detect all of them, and the system that detects unusual activity was down"

all these calls were made over a 7 day period and i think that this amount of expenditure should of been picked up.

Hi jimbob,

I can understand the concerns you've raised here and if possible would like to take a closer look at this.

You've mentioned that you've contacted Ofcom who concluded that you would be liable to pay the entire bill. To enable me to determine whether or not we can help further could you clarify whether it was Ofcom or Otelo?

The reason I ask is that if you've actually referred your case to Otelo, who are one of the industries Ombudsman who review cases on an independent basis, then I'm afraid we wouldn't be able to intervene any further?

However, if it was Ofcom who you liaised with then you're welcome to email us the details of the account in question to webrelations@vodafone.com marked for my attention and we'll review this matter further.

To assist us further could you also include a link to your thread here when sending your email?

Kind regards,

Lee

Web Relations Team

Vodafone UK

Because i work on a goverment contract i reported this to the police and got an incident number which i provided to vodafone, vodafone agreed to give me 50% of the bill if i didnt take my complaint to ofcom, but as i did take it to ofcom they have asked me to pay the full bill.

Vodafone as any other mobile phone company have services in place to detect unusual activity on a mobile phone account, when i asked them about this service and why it didnt pick up my account i was told " we have millions of customers we cant detect all of them, and the system that detects unusual activity was down"

all these calls were made over a 7 day period and i think that this amount of expenditure should of been picked up.

"I would imagine that anyone who has "lost" their passport and suffered identity theft, anyone who has "lost" credit cards or their wallet, someone who has had personal belongiongs removed would also class themselves as being "negligent" and put this purely down to their own fault! Should they pay the cost of what ever has been run up in their name?"

Yes, of course I understand your logic Zeb, I am simply pointing out how a Court would view it. I certainly agree with you that appealing to Vodaphone would be useful. Although I find it quite strange that Vodaphone haven't already studied this in view of the huge bill. My feeling is that we are not getting the full story. Vodaphone clearly don't feel they should pay, and I expect their shareholders would probably agree.

If you lose your wallet, who do you appeal to?

Credit card companies and Banks have a duty of care to their customers, and clear procedures in place when fraud has occurred. Why didn't 'JimBob' report this to the police, since he says he never made these calls because the simcard wasn't in his possession. Isn't that fraud?

That is the pertinent question that I purposely didn't ask.

I would imagine that anyone who has "lost" their passport and suffered identity theft, anyone who has "lost" credit cards or their wallet, someone who has had personal belongiongs removed would also class themselves as being "negligent" and put this purely down to their own fault! Should they pay the cost of what ever has been run up in their name?

While I agree that you are legally respsonsible and that you probably do not have much of an argument i woudl apeal to Vodaphone that the sim card has been used without your permission, that it is clearly obvious that you do not normaly run up bills of this natuire, you do not normally call Iraq from either mobile or landline and that you qwould hopwe that they can look on this matter sympathetically and come to some arrangement. Argue that you have already paid a substantial amount of this bill even though you do not believe that it is from your own actions and see if they can help you to reduce the cost of this unfortunate error.

This is a extraordinarily large mobile phone bill, this is not the norm even for a phone that would have been stolen intentionally. Surely Vodaphone can see this and would work with you for a resolution to suit all of you. Do vodaphone not have a record of the specific phone that the sim card was used on and track it down from there? Surely the IMEI number can do this for them

I think if you had reported this to the police in the first instance of knowing about the bill then this would have been resolved alot quicker and at far less expense

If this went to Court, there would be 2 things at stake here.

1. Were calls made to Iraq using this account? Answer: Yes.
2. Who is responsible for this account? Answer: JimBob.

Now, since the calls were made and that fact can be verified by electronic records, the onus is then on Jimbob to prove beyond reasonable doubt that it wasn't his responsibility.

It doesn't seem fair that Vodaphone should have to foot this bill because of Jimbobs negligence in losing the sim card. And since Jmbob actually used to work for Vodaphone, and would therefore have a better understanding of the systems in place, it would beg the question why wasn't the simcard securely stored?

If you have been to Ofcom officially with a complaint, I am not sure there is much more you can do. You could write to newspaper financial columnists with details of your complaint, which would be of interest to their readers and they might be able to achieve a better outcome.

This should come as warning to others. Losing a sim card linked to a contract, is pretty much the same as losing a credit/debit card, without limit/controls that often apply to those banking cards. If you are not using a sim card, destroy it so that others cannot use it.

Hi,

I had 2 mobile phones and both were on contract, i sold one of the phones and put the simcard in my wallet for safe keeping, ever month my phone bill was £50 on the sim as i wasnt using this simcard as i had my other phone to use. i got a bill of vodafone for £3570 so called them to see what the hell was happening, it turns out all these calls were made to iraq and that i had lost the simcard from my wallet without even noticing.

I complained to vodafone about the calls and i was told tough, its your sim you have to pay for the calls, i took this complaint to ofcom who said in the small print im liable for all calls on the simcard also.

So now i am paying £75 a month for the calls to Iraq that i never made in the first place and got about another £2800 to pay.

Is there anything i can do to get out of this as i dont think its fair that i have to pay for someone else's calls.

As i use to work for vodafone a while ago i know they have systems in place to pick up rogue calls but this system was offline at the time of all these calls being made as confirmed by vodafone when i questioned it.