Overzealous Orange cuts off customer, still bills
Who are you? And where's our money?
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A confused Orange disconnected a customer after he cancelled his brother's account, and then insisted he pay for the suspended line until he produced ID to get reconnected.
The chap in question, one Peter McDougall, signed a contract with Orange in December, but his line was cut without warning in the middle of last week. He called Orange (on another line) and was told he'd have to go to an Orange store and prove his identity to have the phone reconnected.
And no, he couldn't stop paying for the service he was no longer receiving.
We asked Orange what was going on, and the company said: "We noticed excessive usage so we wanted to ensure everything was ok with the account." That sounded perfectly reasonable, except that Orange made no attempt to contact the customer other than one failed call to his landline. And there was no excessive use on the suspended account.
Not that McDougall even got that information - he was simply told that Orange didn't have his ID, and therefore wouldn't reconnect the line, though it was still happy to accept the signature on his contract and thus continue taking his money.
Following our enquiries Orange did reconnect the line and apologise, though it took longer to work out what went wrong.
The problem, it seems, was that McDougall set up a SIM-only account for his brother, who promptly ran up a decent bill and thus surrendered his familial phone rights. The brother's connection was paid off and cancelled.
Two days later Orange decided this was all very dodgy and cut off Peter McDougall's own account without warning. Suggestions that there might be some confusion with his brother's account were initially dismissed, and he was told that Orange's security department had simply realised it didn't have his ID on file and therefore cut off his line.
We're glad Orange has reconnected the line, and hopefully will be ensuring that this remains an isolated incident. Even the operator now admits that "a text message asking the customer to call us would have been more appropriate", which is really the least of it. ®
COMMENTS
That really annoys me
I hate when companies think they can bill you whilst not providing a service. I'm thinking of you BT (Sorry we accidentally cancelled your Home Move request, so it'll be another two weeks but you'll still be charged for the month that you've been without any F*ckin service!)
Personally I'd have gone to the bank and disputed the Direct Debit. Could Orange have justified their end in court?
the Orange scam....
Start a contract account on the 10 th of a month and they set it up with Billing on 10th of month.
After a year, you continue on a 30 day notice period..
Lets say, a few months later, on the 20th of a month you sign for a new 1 year contract (prices come down so you expect an immediate saving - they say you don't have to give notice as you are not leaving them)....
NO
you must pay your old more expensive account from the 20th of one month until the 10th of the next month because that is your "BIlling Date" .. which is now competely separate from your Contract Date.
Try speak to the cretins and they tell you "COMPUTER SAYS... "..."COMPUTER CAN'T BE CHANGED" and other such Morongisms.
Their greed just cost them 43 new line contracts...
Orange customer service - fail
I've had similar experience with Orange. My partner has an Orange contract with one month left - we called orange to give notification we were going to terminate the contract and they offered us an attractive deal to stay - so we agreed - they also said they would cancell the old contract for us and move the number etc. Should be easy since we were staying with orange. First bill arrive with a £400 contact cancellation charge on! wft? After speaking with several call center monkeys who didn't have a clue, we eventaully got though to someone who did know their ass form elbow and managed to explain that orange had goofed - they had set up the new contract for us, then extended the old one and cancelled the new one and charged us.
That wasn't the first problem we'd had with orange and probably won't be the last.
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