Unlocked Iphones - Huge Charges By Bt Mobile

[enoughisenough]

OK so first of all I plead guilty for having an unlocked iphone and falling victim to the iCulture.

Please forgive me if anyone thinks I deserve it for still following 'the path of the consumer'. I've been victim to repossession proceedings, I am the sole earner for a young family and my wife was refused PPI on her loan when she was made redundant at a time of pregnancy. I have tried and succeeded to clobber hers and mine for charges, less so hers because LTSB are UNBELIEVABLY hard to crack.

Anyway I was given an unlocked iphone as a gift for a huge favour I did someone. Stuck my BT mobile sim card in and got going. However, without any notification from BT, despite being with them for 3 years and never running up more than about £30 a month, they land me with a monthly bill of £265.

They never notified me of unusual usage and I was only ever connecting via wi-fi which costs me nothing at home or at work on the computers or even on the itouch which has wi-fi built in but, is just a posh ipod.

Anyhow they now have sent me another bill for £180 even though as soon as I got the last one I called them up, disputed the charges and then switched it off. Although this seems minor a £420 bill could finish us off.

I have had a year of nonsense from BT Mobile

1. Phones Arriving I never asked for.

2. 7 weeks to get their customer services to send Jiffy bags to return said phones.

3, Ordering an extra handset and getting the wrong one- again difficulty in getting them sent back

4. Missing payments, threatening letters and occasional denial of service, despite the evidence of my bank statements. This includes the use of a particularly virulent DCA, called WESTCOT. I had several morons calling me at work and literally sneering at my record of events. BT should be ashamed of themselves for using these people.

5. Two consecutive payments made on the same day despite the first having not gone through (later confirmed by bank statements). I was therefore advised to 'try the payment again' (Potential for fraud here???)

6. Numerous calls, often cut off for no reason, amounting to literally hours of my time

7. Numerous promises from August 2007 that such issues, mainly missing payments had been resolved.

6. Unbelievably, compensation paid of £60 approx, authorized and delivered by a front line member of call centre staff in October 2007, having assured me that BT had got their house in order with regards to my account.

7. Cut off in January, despite in dispute, and despite having been promised after yet another hour long phone call, that as a result of the dispute this would NOT happen.

8. Assured that phones that had been assigned to my account would be removed from my bill In January. Took until May to do so.

9. £300 charges applied to my account in March which did not (literally) ADD up

10. Despite the help of Lucy Waring of BT , who eventually cleared all of the problems, but who has asked me not to contact her again but go through regular 'customer services' (sic), I have been subjected to an horrific catalogue of errors.

11. BT charges £25.25 for blackberry unlimited access to email. How can it possibly reconcile this with the costs it has applied to me? How can 02 offer £35 and 7500 minutes web access, 600 minutes and 500 texts? Where is the actual comparison cost to BT in relation to my bills?

12. I have yet to understand that despite deactivitaing every possible aspect of the phone that could cause such massive usage BT have issued a new bill for £180 ( This is supplemental to the previous bill NOT A REPLACEMENT)

12. I was advised yesterday when I made complain that if I switched to BT Fusion I would not occur these costs - this is outrageous. Why would I want anything more to do with BT?

Please Help

[daKlone]

Is the bill itemised? What are the charges actually for?

[enoughisenough]

Itemised. Charges are for GPRS usage even though I only connected using wi-fi. In any case how come 02 can make a profit on 7500 web minutes per month but BT need to charge 10 times that for about 1% of that? Seems a case of gross profiteering. OFCOM next step, to whom they may well have justify their GPRS charges.

[daKlone]

Is there no possible way that you or someone else could have used the GPRS minutes, even by mistake?

I'm not sure of the legal position but I would have thought that you would have to prove that you didn't use them (don't know how you'd do that) before BT would drop the bill.

Good luck with it anyway - hope you get it sorted out. Don't forget to post the conclusion to the story.

[buzby]

The iPhone makes use of GPRS by default, and NEEDS a special tariff to allow this without bankrupting the user. If you popped your own O2 SIM into and iPhone instead of using the one contracted for, you'd find yourself in the same situation. You need the dedicated iPhone tariff to prevent this problem happening, and since only O2 are licenced to connect it, any other network will not have a comparable tariff available.

[davethorp]

The other networks unlimited data add ons would allow for iphone data usage as well however as with all networks unlimited data watch for hidden limits

Unfortunately as BT Mobile doesn't have data bundles that doesn't help.

Are you absolutely sure all data access was done through wifi rather than GPRS? When a wifi connection is established the iphone has a different symbol at the top compared to when it is connecting through GPRS or 3G

[buzby]

It is NOT an issue with 'unlimited data' as we all know, this is no such thing. O2 have a dedicated servier accessible only from their network to run many of the services, access them any other way and problems may occur. Also we are talking only about GPRS data, not broadband or circuit switched, all of which dice the cake a differnet way.

[kopw]

I've been with BT Mobile for the past 18 months. I can't wait for my contract to expire on thursday. I've had no end of problems with them. Three times they have taken money out of my account without authorisation, resulting in penalty charges by my greedy bank, Nationwide. Upon contacting them to ask what the hell their game was, I was told that they were responding to my instructions. Total garbage. I phoned them last month to cancel my contract, giving them what I thought was a statutory 30 day notice, and was told to phone back on the final day. It seems that it only takes a few hours to close the account. Everyone else needs 30 days notice, not BT Mobile. I'm bracing myself for a rough ride. I'll cancel my direct debit on thursday and settle any outstanding bill with my card. I'm not leaving a direct debit in place for these morons to empty my bank account.

[buzby]

The issue of notice is a simple one, you WRITE by recorded delivery requesting closure so you have a copy and the receipt of posting should it go wrong. If you do it verbally, you have no proof ot substantiation to claim should they not follow your request to cancel.

You may not think it, but they're really doing you a BIG favour!