It’s a saga, but I’ll try to keep it to bullet points.
We are talking about a phone company, part of a bigger group. It begins with a ‘V’.
DH works at sea and while he was away he saw a message from the bank saying that ‘V’ had taken a larger amount than the contract. I took over ‘his’ contract when he got a new phone so he’s the account holder. When he got home he questioned whether or not I’d been doing any charity donations or other weird payable activities. The answer was no. I haven’t.
He called ‘V’ on Thursday, and they said that we must have signed up to a lottery deal, all above board. DH explained that we hadn’t, this was fraud and could they at least block the number from taking any further money. ‘V’ said they couldn’t.
I googled the number 82288 and there are about 3 pages of ‘It’s a fraud!’ as the result. Many people had no idea of how they signed up to it, including people like software engineers who probably have modestly good IT skills. There was a moment when I got hit by an adware thing, which I sorted within an hour by resetting the laptop and buying fabulous antivirus, back in November and I suspect that it might have been something there. When the adware hit I know I backed off from clicking anything and got straight onto my phone to research how to fix it.
DH phoned his bank and discussed it with them. They agreed that it was fraudulent and under the Direct Debit guarantee, and the indemnity claim that protects consumers, the bank refunded us and would claw-back the payment that had been paid out a few days before.
On Friday DH called the police action fraud number and reported it. The person answering the phone knew the number without looking it up, agreed that it is a known fraud and gave us a crime number.
DH called back to ‘V’ and spoke to someone named Chris and quoted the crime number. Chris spoke with his manager and they agreed to write-off the fraud amount, leaving our account clear to pay just the contract. Chris may have been mistaken about his name, his ID number, and in fact the changes made to the account in view of the crime number. It now seems that there is no call to ‘V’ at this time recorded on the account. Chris may not be very truthful.
We contacted ‘V’ to let them know that this would be happening and we agreed that I would call back on Wednesday (tomorrow) to arrange payment. Obviously we handed in our notice to stop the account on one of the calls and were happy to pay the contract for the next 30 days. Yesterday the bank reversal must have gone through and they’ve suspended the account.
DH called this evening, had to go through the whole saga with a new customer service person. They have not and will not remove the fraudulent charges, or pass us onto a manager or fraud department. We’re offering to pay last month’s contract and a pro-rata amount until they stopped our account today.
How do I make someone at ‘V’ pay attention? Before I have to hit my head against a real wall instead of a metaphorical one.