 3 Mobile Options - Beware
I've come across a neat inertia led scam run by the above company that completely disadvantages the subscriber, unless you are quick enough to spot it and demand fair play it will cost you dearly. I'm a contract customer, but this could just as easily affect PAYG customers as well.
3 offer many of their additional services priced individually or in bundles; for example, to watch ITV on your handset, you are charged 99p for each 24 hour period you watch one of their TV channels, OR you can opt to pay £5.99 and receive a full month instead, this can be done on your handset from the Shopping Basket option. I decided to give TV a go, and on 25/09 ordered the bundle, and I was advised this would cost £5.99, so no surprises there.
Here's the scam. What you are NOT told, is that your bundle is an ongoing commitment, and whilst you can order it online from the handset, there is no mechanism to cease or cancel the bundle, so the implication is you'd need to renew your bundle each month, so if (like me) you thought the service was dreadful - static captions when there were adverts running - a phone so hot you could fry an egg on it, and a screen so small you needed a magnifying glass to see anything - by doing nothing, the next thing you find is your account is debited with the next month's fee automatically.
Looking into this a bit further, although I signed up to the package on 25/09 my bill generated on 21/10 showed that the system treated my subscription as starting from the BILLING date (losing 4 days of 30), so a call to Customer Service to enforce the cancellation resulted in my demanding not only the return of the fee billed for next month, but for the 4 days they backdated service to sync up with my billing date. This isn't a major amount of money, but I agreed only to pay £5.99 to try the service for a month, and ended up having a rolling commitment and date juggling to make its discovery difficult. Also, I was charged an additional 99p to watch a Music Video that whilst hte TV service bundle was active, the channel watched was seemingly NOT part of the package, so generating a fresh one-off fee!
My advice? Either be very very careful about what you order from these mobile networks, and ALWAYS check your bill. If PAYG, don.t even think about using these services as your Top Ups will disappear without warinng and you'll wonder where your talktime went!
Last edited by buzby; 25th October 2006 at 10:44.
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