Ofcom comes down hard on the mobile phone operator
Mobile phone operator Vodafone has been fined £4.6m by Ofcom for “serious and sustained breaches of consumer protection rules”.
Ofcom has said Vodafone has been charging pay-as-you-go customers for top-up credit but has been “providing nothing in return”.
The regulator has also found the company broke rules over dealing with complaints.
Most recent fines came to light after two previous investigations were dealt with earlier in the year.
One of these found that over 10,000 pay-as-you-go customers lost their fair share after Vodafone failed to credit their accounts after customers had paid for a top-up.
Customer involved in the incident collectively lost £150,000 over a 17-month period, Ofcom said
The company moved to a new billing system which caused IT issues and therefore problems ensued.
Vodafone told the Mirror: “We deeply regret these system and process failures. We are completely focused on serving our customers: everyone who works for us is expected to do their utmost to meet our customers’ needs, day after day, and act quickly and efficiently if something goes wrong.
“It is clear from Ofcom’s findings that we did not do that often enough or well enough on a number of occasions.
“We offer our profound apologies to anyone affected by these errors.”
The mobile giant has since said it has refunded or re-credited 10,422 pay-as-you-go customers out of the total 10,453 affected. The company said they’ve been unable to track down the remaining 30.
Leave a Comment