Category: Complaints

New response:

Hello Iain,

Thank you for contacting us about the costs of the call we made to you and further costs for your cybercafe use.

I’m sorry you’re not happy with the previous responses you’ve received from us.

I’m unable to refund you for these costs as Louise and Catherine have previously said. You’re aware of your charges when you’re abroad and so understood that there would be a charge, for answering your phone when you were away.

I understand you only answered this call thinking it was one of your friends or family, however if it was another business calling you i.e. a gas company’s sales team, you would have still been charged and wouldn’t be able to claim the costs back from them.

I’m sorry for the inconvenience you had trying to Top-Up your phone and having to go to several internet cafes to write to us and get a Top-Up. As previously said we won’t be able to refund you, as you were aware of your charges before answering your phone. Although you may not have realised it wasn’t your friends or family, if the call was from another person you would still have been charged and had to Top-Up your phone.

I’m afraid we won’t be able to help you this any further, as we’ve explained to you the reasons why we can’t refund you for the cost of the call or internet use.

And my new one to them:

And another fob-off reply. The matter is not that you “cannot” refund me, it is that you “will not”. There is a world of difference between the two. Let me put it into small points that perhaps you can grasp:

1) You should not have called me. You had no permission. You should not even have had my number. This is, as far as I’m aware, illegal.

2) Yes, I am aware of the call charges. As a result only friends and family have my number. Or so I thought. I did everything *I* could not to be bothered by ignorant sales staff from faceless companies.

3) How do you know I would not be able to recover money from, as per your example, a gas company? For them to call me they would have had to ring me – against my wishes – from a database of phone numbers which they should not have had. That is, they would be in the same position as yourselves, acting immorally and illegally. Maybe their staff would realise that they had done something wrong and would act to make reparation.

I will not give up on asking for my money back. Your company acted illegally, you cost me money and now you’re refusing to cough up what – to O2 – is a trifling small sum. As is typical of large companies you don’t give a **** about anyone smaller than yourselves, and the inconvenience you put them through as long as your shareholders earn enough each year to fuel their Ferraris.

Not. Good. Enough.

Let us get the semantics correct here. There is no truth that you “cannot” refund my money. The fact of the matter is that you *refuse* to do so. There is a huge difference between the two. Perhaps you may like to forward this message further up your internal food chain to someone who is allowed to make decisions rather than passing it around a load of people who’ve been trained to give the same answer all the time.

This is what is called a “matter of principle”. While I appreciate that O2 obviously *has* no principles, now may be a good time to discover them.

Another ridiculous reply:

Good afternoon Iain,

Thank you for your email.

I’m sorry that you’re unhappy with our earlier email about the call you received while you were in France.

I can understand that you wanted your phone with you so you could keep in contact with your friends and family. I appreciate that you would answer all calls when your phone rang, it wasn’t our intention to say that you shouldn’t have answered this particular call.

I’m afraid that as you’re not an O2 customer it’s not possible for us to refund you the cost of this call. Unfortunately, I’m also unable to refund you for the use of cyber cafes in France as this charge is out of our control.

I am sorry for the inconvenience this may have caused you Iain. I hope I’ve explained everything clearly.

And another reply to them:

Re: O2 – Sales call (KMM241462142V17790L0KM)
On 03/09/07, mycarewebform wrote:
> I’m sorry that you’re unhappy with our earlier email about the call you received while you were in France.

It seems not sorry enough.

> when your phone rang, it wasn’t our intention to say that you shouldn’t have
> answered this particular call.

So why did you say that I had the opportunity to refuse the call, then? Your two emails have just contradicted one another. Of course, this is the usual experience when dealing with a large organisation where one hand doesn’t know what the other is doing. Or you’re just trying to clear up a mess made by a colleague who should have known better than to insinuate the the problem was of my own making.

> I’m afraid that as you’re not an O2 customer it’s not possible for us to refund you

This is, if I may say so, utter cobblers. What you’re saying is that you *refuse* to refund the money as I am not an O2 customer. I appreciate that if I had an account with you, you would credit it to that. This would be easy for you. What I’m asking you to do is dust the cobwebs off the corporate cheque book and make good an error which inconvenienced someone who in no way fills up your coffers. As such, I understand that I rank incredibly far down in your list of importance. After all, it’s not like you need to keep me happy is it? I’m not going to change to another provider as I’m already with one.

> the cost of this call. Unfortunately, I’m also unable to refund you for the use of
> cyber cafes in France as this charge is out of our control.

And again I put it to you that you aren’t unable, but are refusing. The charge was certainly not out of your control. If your staff had not called me – which they should not have done as they do not have permission – I would not have had to detour via somewhere I could email at short notice to get credit on my phone. And let’s not even mention the inconvenience of being unable to receive any calls for two days. After all, there’s no point in mentioning it when you obviously don’t care.

> I am sorry for the inconvenience this may have caused you Iain. I hope I’ve explained everything clearly.

You have explained in pretty clear tones that you don’t care about inconveniencing people, costing them money, backtracking over stupid remarks, and being a completely awful company to deal with. Frankly I’m glad I stuck with Vodafone when I considered changing a couple of years ago. They’re awful, but at least they don’t try and wheedle out of refunding money when they screw up.

As I said, repeatedly, your company cost me money and caused me great inconvenience through actions which are actually potentially illegal. Calling me on a telephone number which I have not given you permission to call – and which is in fact listed on the Telephone Preference List – is against the law, as far as I’m aware. To then say that it’s my problem and you’re “unable” to refund me is complete and utter rubbish.

You admit that you should not have called, claim to appreciate the cost and inconvenience, and yet refuse to make reasonable recompense. I find it impossible to believe that in a company the size of O2 you have no means of refunding money to non-clients. This means that as well as making unsolicited phone calls, having awful support, hiring rude staff who hang up on you, providing an unusable comments form on your web page and simply not caring about the problems you cause people… you are also liars.

Nice advert for your company. Have you thought of entering the building trade?

Mosh

Reply from O2:

Thank you for emailing to ask us not to call your mobile phone.

I’ve arranged for any marketing calls or texts to your mobile to be stopped. This will be processed within 40 days.

I’m unable to refund you the 75 pence it cost you to accept the phone call and the money to email home for more credit. The reason for this is that you could have refused to accept the call.

I’m sure that this isn’t what you were hoping to hear, Iain, but at least the phone calls will cease. I’m sorry for any inconvenience which may have been caused to you.

I hope I’ve explained this clearly for you. If there’s anything else we can do for you, please reply to this email.

Not good enough. My response seemed to wander somewhat into the sarcastic and bitter:

Oh dear, oh dear. This is wholly unacceptable.

On 01/09/07, mycarewebform wrote:
> I’ve arranged for any marketing calls or texts to your mobile to be stopped. This will be processed within 40 days.

Fine, but the fact remains that the call should never have been made in the first place and I’m still at a loss as to which dodgy spammer you bought my contact details from in the first place.

> I’m unable to refund you the 75 pence it cost you to accept the phone call and the money to email home for more credit. The reason for this is that you could have refused to accept the call.

And this really is, to use a polite version of the phrase I would prefer to use, taking the Michael. You’re blaming me for answering my phone when it was called from an unrecognised UK number? As I stated in my original mail, the phone is there for family at home to contact me in an emergency. They are the only ones with the number – or so I thought. Therefore if it rings, regardless of the number displayed on the screen, I should be able to answer it in the knowledge that it will be someone I know with a genuine need for calling. Not some muppet in a call centre trying to up his commission for the month.

It seems to me that your solution to my problem is to never answer my phone, or to have every single possible location that my family could call from entered into my phone. Sorry, but it’s an old Nokia 3330 and doesn’t have the same memory capacity as one of Google’s data farms. It simply won’t hold all those numbers.

The problem and the resulting loss of money and huge inconvenience was the fault of your organisation. Completely and utterly. I did have to answer that call as I didn’t know who it was. You, on the other hand did not have to call me – and in fact certainly did not have the right to do so.

I fully understand that as a large corporation you have no morales, scruples or interest in anyone other than your shareholders and – to a lesser extent – your customers. That’s life in the business world. Regardless, you have cost me money and time and are now trying to blame me for it which stretches the bounds of ridiculousness to the extremes and beyond. Maybe you would suggest that when I return home I don’t live in my home or drive my car? And Heaven forbid that I should watch network broadcasts on my television. They’re obviously all just for decoration like my telephone I’m not supposed to answer.

You have my address and the amount of compensation I have requested. I’d have thought that a company like O2 could find a couple of quid down the back of the executive leather sofa they undoubtedly have in reception. Although, of course, you probably don’t expect people to sit on it.

The email I just sent them pretty much explains it:

First thing first – DO NOT PHONE ME ON MY MOBILE NUMBER.

I have a complaint to raise regarding your marketing. This morning I received an unsolicited call from one of your sales staff. I have never been an O2 customer and after this morning you can rest assured I never will be. I have no idea how you got my name and number and I’m extremely angry that someone called me when they did.

I am currently in France as part of a 1000-mile charity walk, and as such I’m paying the usual ludicrous roaming charges that all UK customers are subject to. As I’m on Vodafone, this includes a 75p charge for receiving any call. My phone is therefore used by friends and family for emergency use only. I saw a “+44” number calling, so I answered only to have one of your idiot staff greet me. I told him that he had called at a very bad time and that I wished to speak to a supervisor or manager, at which point he hung up on me.

Your staff member’s call cost me money and brought me under 75p on my call balance which means I now have to contact someone in the UK to go and purchase a topup card and email me the details so I can get more credit. This is a huge inconvenience and likely means that for a day or so I will be unable to receive any incoming calls should anyone have a genuine emergency.

I demand a full, written apology and recompense for the inconvenience you have caused. Obviously, I require the 75p refunded plus the sum of 5 Euros (GBP equivalent is UK3.40) which I had to pay at a cybercafe to email home for further credit, to email yourselves and to tell people my phone was useless for the next day or so. Frankly, I should be demanding money for the time I’m wasting as well but it’s up to you to decide if someone who’s not a customer is worth that or not.

Rest assured I will also be contacting the Telephone Preference List people to inform them of your breach of their regulations as well.

Kindly send your apology and cheque, at your earliest convenience, to:

[etc]

Anything above and beyond the recompense I have requested will be donated to the charity for which I am walking – the Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation in Vietnam (www.bdcf.org).

Actually, as their web for is ******* ****, I had to reduce the message down to a smaller size. I kept getting “your message is too long” errors with no indication of how large it was allowed to be. I mean how crap can you get? As such, the message I ended up sending was:

DO NOT PHONE ME ON MY MOBILE NUMBER.

Your contact form is useless as it will not accept my complaint – it tells me it is too long. Please email me so that I can send you my details in full using something that actually *works*. I repeat the above message – DO NOT CALL ME ON MY MOBILE NUMBER.

Seems like a bit of a fob-off…

Dear Mosh,

Thanks for your e-mail about the payments that left your account.

I’ve performed an audit of your online activity and can see that on the same afternoon as you logged on, you tried to set up a payment but this was not confirmed successfully. This is why, when you went back to your ‘Transfers and payments’ page there was no record of the payment. You had not entered your password to confirm the transaction. If you had done this it would’ve displayed the amount due to be paid and the date it was due to leave your account.

Pending transactions are not erased from the ‘Transfers and Payments’ page until the money has left your account.

If you check the entries on your statement you will see that only one of the transactions that left your account was an Internet Banking bill payment. You will see this by looking at the ‘Transaction Type’ column.

We cannot discuss any charges applied by the Nationwide, however if you’d like to speak to someone about the possibility of having any charges rescinded on your account with us, then you should contact either Phonebank or your branch.

Phonebank can be contacted on 0845 3000 000 (00 44 2077 857 654, from overseas) and are available 24 hours a day.

You can find contact details for our branches by clicking the link below:

http://www.lloydstsb.com/branch_locator/search.asp

If there’s anything else we can help you with, please let us know. Alternatively, to obtain an instant answer, why not try using our Online Help Centre at http://lloydstsb.creativevirtual.com/LloydsTSB/? It answers over 90% of our customers’ questions.

Many Thanks

Not good enough…

Thanks for the reply but there is definitely an inaccuracy there. I do
recall starting to process a new transaction and failing to enter the
password. The reason for this was when I logged in and looked, no
money had left my account to pay off my Nationwide card. I thought I’d
set up a transaction some weeks ago to do just this, but on looking…
nothing was listed in the Bills and Payments section. So I started
adding such a payment.

Then I realised that if I did this, the money would arrive with the
credit card company 3-4 days too late and I’d be hammered for
interest. Instead, I cancelled the transaction I was inputting and
made the card bill payment from my Nationwide account (knocking it
overdrawn, but ensuring the payment took place same day) and arranged
a payment from my LloydsTSB account to my Nationwide account to bring
the Nationwide one back into credit. A smaller financial “hit” than
the perceived credit card fee.

Hence imagine my surprise and annoyance a few days later when I
noticed that my credit card was in … well… credit. The payment it
turns out I *had* arranged from Lloyds TSB had existed and had gone
through as well as the “replacement” one I’d made from the Nationwide
– hence two large withdrawals from Lloyds, one of which wasn’t needed.

I can completely and utterly promise you that when I first logged in
at the start of this palaver, there were no details of pending
transactions for the Nationwide Card listed on the Bills and Payments
section. It was blank, insinuating that no such payment had been set
up – otherwise I’d not have arranged the other payments (from and to
my Nationwide current account).

This is the issue I have. The information presented to me when I
logged in – no pending transaction and no debit from my account – led
me to believe that I’d forgotten to set up the transaction. Hence why
I want to ensure that I am no charged any fees as a result of going
withdrawn. I can only go by the information I am given by Lloyds and
that information, in this case, was incorrect.

Unfortunately, I do not have a phone bank account and walking into my
branch is somewhat impossible as I’m in Nice and won’t be back in the
UK until October as I am engaging in a charity walk from Monaco to
Newcastle!

Thanks