Top ups on a contract phone

[JagerPlease]

My mum has medical issues which mean that she has a significantly impaired short term memory. To avoid recurrences of issues where she forgot to top up her phone and had no way of contacting anyone, I got her a contract phone about 2 years ago which I pay the monthly bill for.

She has now told me that "when she gets a text saying her balance is £0, she goes and buys a top up and puts it on her phone". She hasn't kept any of these texts, but I can only assume that they are actually saying that the balance owed is £0. But if that is the case, she has probably been receiving that message once a month for 2 years, and going and buying a top up.

Does anyone have any idea how she has actually been managing to activate the top ups? (Where you call the number on the card and it gets added to your phone). I'm just at a loss as to how the top ups have gone through and where that money has actually gone!

Is she with giffgaff? If so, you can set up a monthly goodybag to recur and choose how much you want to spend - might be a better way of doing it, rather than top ups?

She's with Tesco mobile, and the thing is I pay her bill and its more than she needs, but somehow she's been managing to put top ups on....and I have no idea how that's actually possible!

She hasn't been. Whatever she is doing with the credit she hasn't been adding it to her contract.

Phone Tesco mobile, they will be able to tell you if she has actually added extra on.

If you have the account with Tesco, try and talk to them about it.

I've had accounts with Giff Gaff, Lebara and Smarty over the last couple of years (trying to find a functioning network in my house) all on rolling PAYG month to month sim only 'contracts' and have rarely had any texts telling me to top up - I pay a fiver or month or so and that gives me more or less unlimited calls and texts, and a decent number of Gb data allowance - certainly enough unless you're glued to it 24/7 and have rarely been told that I need to top up - once or twice the data would run out and I'd just do without data for a few days.

However, check that it's not all been gobbled up by updates and apps downloading stuff when they should be on home wifi. Both my DM and her sister (both in their 70s) didn't understand the difference between mobile data and wifi, allowances etc and would lose their PAYG allowance in minutes/hours because their phones would do all the updates on mobile data not wifi.

Can she also show you the bank statement for the card she's using for the top ups to see if you can see who she's paying, if anyone?