Student must pay £1,400 for one day’s calls on lost phone
A student has been told that he must pay Orange more than £1,400 after thieves are believed to have stolen his mobile phone and made more than 1,000 calls to premium rate numbers.
In the space of 19 hours, Jonathan Barnes’s phone was used to make 1,385 calls to television quiz channels charging 90p a time. The phone also sent 261 premium text messages.
Because the 20-year-old business student took nearly a day to report his phone missing, Orange has told him that he has to pay for the calls.
Caught this one in this morning’s Telegraph. It’s a challenging one. Whatever the explanation, it isn’t good enough to wait a day before realising your phone has been stolen.
He said he realised that the phone was missing the following morning but did not ring Orange to cancel the phone until later that evening.
See, you can’t do that. Not if it’s a contract handset. It’s like noticing you’ve lost your wallet or a credit card — you have to notify them right-away.
Your average 20 year old wouldn’t be able to function without a handset nearby them so it’s certainly unusual that Mr Barnes noticed his phone was missing in the morning but didn’t call Orange to report it. Most folk would be calling Orange half to report the missing handset and half to make sure Orange sent them out a replacement handset right away!
Here’s another issue here though. What stupid, stupid, stupid mobile operator reckons that someone who normally has a monthly bill in the region of £30-£40, would seriously be making £1,500 worth of calls in one day?
That’s where Orange have screwed up. Why didn’t this pop up on their ‘strange usage’ screen? Why didn’t they give Mr Barnes a call when the bill got to £500?
T-Mobile, it seems, give me about +/- £100 over my average monthly bill before dropping me a text to let me know that I”m nearing my credit limit. Should I go over this limit, I need to call them to make a payment — not necessarily the full bill, just £20 or £30 to keep me within the limit. Eminently sensible for both parties.
I wonder why Orange don’t have this? Or perhaps they do… who knows?
If orange had called him, they’d have called the phone which had been stolen. Wouldn’t really have helped…
Aye, but they could have phoned him at £150 and asked him to give his account password. OR told him that he’s gone over his credit limit and that he has to call Orange Support to lift his temporary bar. Something like that.
I am with Ewan on this one. Fraud prevention is a shared problem and after probably around £150 they should have done something.
Yeah it was stupid but that doesn’t discount Orange’s responsibility to protect their customers.
Orange should step up, announce a new policy and pay the portion of the students bill that would have been covered had the policy been in place earlier.
I am not on the students side, but I don’t think Orange is any less guilty either. I am glad I am switching to T-Mobile now.