Check your Vodafone Bills, especially if you have an iPhone!
It’s becoming clear to me that more and more companies are adding spurious charges to their bills, knowing that most people won’t notice and just pay them. Be warned and take notice. Vodafone is the latest.
We both have iPhones. And fr the first three months of our contracts with Vodafone, made use of the free data downloads that were available, but after that went onto their $1 a day for 1mb option, so we could use it if we needed to in a pinch. But the thing is here, we don’t use it.
However, we both got charges on the next bill for Data – which is odd if we never connected to the Internet from our phones.
Now, the really interest thing is that theres absolutely no breakdown of dates, times or downloads. Phone calls are itemised to the second – showing the number called, where that his, length of call and cost of call. But with the data – absolutely nothing. The best you get is:
Now – heres where it gets a bit suss. Hubby called to query his bill, and was told that this was our iPhone Apps automatically getting updates.
Except that iPhones update by going to iTunes – not going to a Vodafone website. And besides – we actually haven’t updated any Apps. (You can perhaps imagine the shock at the Vodafone side of this conversation as to why exactly we have iPhones if you aren’t connecting to the Internet and downloading Apps every second of our days.
What can I say – we live to be awkward.
So what it looks like is happening (and clearly we cant be certain about this), is that Vodafone are connecting to our phones via their website and charging us for the privilege. Hubby asked for a breakdown of usage and was told they couldn’t do it.
Hmmmmm. Funny that!
So, we asked them to remove the charge – and guess what – they did. When the same thing happened on my bill, we also asked for the charge to be dropped – after going through the same set of “it’s your iPhone Apps” rubbish.
So be very careful. Obviously this is a lot harder to track if you ARE using Internet capabilities on your phone. But you actually can track your own usage on your phone:
When your billing day comes you need to reset your usage on the phone
- Go to Settings
- General
- Usage – scroll to the bottom and it has your cellular network data- sent and received.
- Hit reset statistics and it zeros the data record.
- Then you can check at the end of the billing period whether it matches your Vodafone bill, or you are being overcharged.
If you are being overcharged – then ask for a refund on your bill, and I also suggest making a complaint (can be done online) to the Commerce Commission under the fair trading act which says:
Fair Trading Act 1986
The Fair Trading Act was developed with the Commerce Act to encourage competition and to protect consumers from misleading and deceptive conduct and unfair trading practices
Please be aware – more and more companies seem to trying to add extra charges to bills. We can’t know for definite if that is what Vodafone are doing, but until they provide dates and times of the supposed downloads, all we have to go on is that we are being charged for using the Internet when we aren’t actually using it. And if anyone has a better explanation – please do let me know 
Check your bills.
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