Unhappy return to a horrific mobile bill

From Alan Spencer.

ON our recent holiday one of our children was using my mobile phone without anyone’s knowledge on the Internet.

From Alan Spencer.

ON our recent holiday one of our children was using my mobile phone without anyone’s knowledge on the Internet.

To get to the point, they ran up a £931 bill while we were there. We only received a text from Sure advising us to call their billing centre due to high usage once the bill was at this level.

Surely the technology must be in place to send a text way before a bill gets this high, especially when by looking at our bill they would see that we never spend more than £70-£100 per month and have done for years.

We have paid the bill but we do feel angry that we were not informed way before it got to this level. We are writing this letter hoping that someone at Sure may do something about this and save other families from such a horrific welcome home – and, to your readers, please make sure your password is changed before you go on holiday and the addicted-to-Facebook generation doesn’t get hold of your mobile.

From Louise Burrows, marketing and PR manager, Sure.

THE problem of running up large phone bills while abroad is an issue we recognise and we help our customers from the moment they buy a Sure mobile subscription – the controls we have in place mean customers have to specifically request that data roaming is enabled on their account, otherwise it is turned off as standard. We also send our customers a text message when they reach their destination advising them of the charges they will incur should they use their mobile.

However we recognise that more needs to be done and I am pleased to say that Sure will be the first Channel Island operator to introduce an option for customers to pre-set a limit for data roaming before they travel. We are currently testing this on our systems and hope to launch very soon, as was reported in the JEP of 8 August (Spending cap will end ‘bill shock’ for mobile phone users).

I appreciate it is unfortunate for this particular customer that we were unable to introduce this sooner, but we had to make significant upgrades to our systems for this to be possible.

I note from the letter that our customer has already paid their bill, but would urge any other customers with a similar problem to contact our billing team as soon as possible so we can help them.