Court of Mumsnet, please: Just how much fuss should I make about this?

[frogs]

Okay, so there I am in the Orange phone shop with 11-yo dd1, buying a cheap and cheerful PAYG phone for her start at secondary school next week. The guy disappears off to the back as they all seem to do, returns with the phone, we call Orange to register it, blah blah, I pay £49.50 and off we go.

Once at home I'm customising it for dd1, and discover that the phone has a long list of someone else's contacts in it, a call register of someone else's calls, and in fact contains what is clearly a recycled SIM card.

Now aside from the fact that the cheeky gits in the Orange shop are upping their profit margins by passing off old SIM cards as new, I'm rather more hacked off by the security angle. Obviously in the great scheme of things, it is unlikely that the previous owner of the card was using the phone to run a drug-dealing business or contact a string of gay lovers, but there must be a good chance that dd1 might at some point receive unwanted calls or texts from god-knows who.

So how much fuss do you think I should make, when I take it back to the shop today? I think a grovelling apology and £10 of free credit would be a good start, but would like to run it past MN first to gauge the reaction here.

I agree you should complain loudly in the shop, and also tell them that you are going to contact the head office or customer services via the website, so they know their little scam will be reported. Sounds really suss, as we've never had this issue with Orange.

i used to work in mobile phones and toward end(my reason for leaving other than having dd)
was that this kind of thing WAS going on..and any time someone complains, theyll be all shocked and 'oh what a terrible one of incident'..bullshit, they all do it

Go for it frogs! Blooming cheek

you will prob find thatit is the handset that holds this and not the sim. as if someone has it for 14 days and takes it back they do resell them as new phones. do take both handset and fone back and kick up a polite fuss. let us know how it goes.

yes it is the handset that holds this info and not the sim. The contact details etc are in the phone memory. I bought my dh a new phone yesterday as his oll one is dying, and he had to copy all the details from his old phone over to the new one despite the fact he had put his old sim in the new phone. So they've given you a reconditioned phone as opposed to a brand new one. So your dd is not at any risk, as she will have been given a new phone number with her sim card, but obviously she could potentially access all this information if she so chose, and therefore the privacy of the person who traded in that phone has been violated. I would have a look on ebay and see how much this model goes for second hand, because this is effectively what you have been sold - a second hand phone, then go back to the orange shop and say you're not happy as you've been sold something as new and it's not and you know you can get that model for xx second hand so you at least want that amount of money in credit.

Actually, I'm fairly sure that different SIMs do have storage memory for contact numbers. On some phones you need to choose whether to sort contact numbers on the handset or the SIM IYSWIM.

Orange shops aren't franchises so far as I know. A friend's fiance is manager of one and he was definitely transferred in from a different branch, which implies it's not a franchise structure.

Agree with hub, contact details can be on sim or phone or both, depending on the model.

Local Trading Standards Office is a good place to contact as well. They would be very interested and are always very helpful. Usually puts the fear of God into shops, especially if they know they are trying to pull a fast one on you.

Agree with contacting Trading Standards - goods are clearly not as described - and the previous owner might be interested to know too. What a racket !

You can definitely store numbers etc. on either the handset/phone memory, or SIM memory, or even both. So it could be either the handset that isn't new, or the SIM, or both. That could mean you could even have two people's details - 1 person's old handset, and 1 person's old SIM.

Good luck with your fuss-making!

we had similar type thing dinosoar. moved into a new build house, only it turned out that the houses up the road had been re-numbered so the new ones could be numbered from 1-24 etc. we lived in number 8, and the previous number 8 (now renumbered 62, still following?) had belonged to someone who owed massive amounts of debt. We had post for said individual, and bayliffs came round to talk about his debts, and we kept having to explain that he never had lived in that house, that he did live in number 8 but that that number 8 had been renumbered 62. They weren't too keen to believe us. it was particularly bad when a bayliff came round at 9:00 at night and i was in on my own. he was very threatening and I could only get rid of him by threatening to call the police.

An update, for all who took the trouble to post.

I did try to contact Orange head office, but you can't get a functioning telephone number for the people who know what they're doing, and I was disinclined to spend 45 minutes in automated menu hell. But I did phone trading standards to find out the lowdown: very naughty, said the lady from TS, breach of civil contract (selling old goods for new), you are entitled to full replacement and could reasonably expect some compensation for the time and hassle.

So off we went to the Orange shop, three grumpy children in tow. Spoke to manager who acted extremely perplexed, and almost as if he didn't believe me. Cue lots of, "I can't see how that could have happened...". Not terribly convincing, really, since even I can see what they'd done and I know bog-all about mobiles.

Still, he pootled off to sort it out, and I put it to him that he might like to add some extra credit on Dd1's phone as well. Upshot: shiny new card, which I witnessed being pushed out of its little credit-card holder thingy plus £10 free credit. And unlike the numbers, the phone settings were saved, so dd1 still has her bullfrog ringtone.

Still peed off at them, though -- what a bunch of chancers.