Autotop up and expired payment cards

[Anonymous]

I am a very low usage user, making a few minutes of phone calls every month.  My main usage is a limited fetching of e-mails whilst out and about, and occassional browsing. I do make a few short calls, but max about 10 minutes a month.

What normally happens is that I have an allowance of something (some minutes, some texts and some MB of data) which is way more than I normally use, so at the end of the month I loose it all, and my top up balance comes down as a result of the £1/day charge, when I leave the house, and sometimes even whilst in the house, despite wifi.  I have autotop up that comes on to give another £10 when the balance drops below £10.  That £10 gives me another months allowance.

I normally end up paying about £10 every 6 weeks.  For my low usage that is a very good tariff.  About a week ago, I got a message that my last payment had failed.  The card registered to take my payment had expired, so my low tariff. So I went into my account and updated my payment card details.

Yesterday, auto top-up took TWO payments of £10 from my account.  

I went on to live chat to ask why I had been charged twice, and to ask for one payment to be refunded.  I was refused.

What I was told was, that changing payment card details causes an auto top up to occur, and after checking with the supervisor, the person I was chatting with told me a refund couldn't be made.

It seems to me there is something wrong with the auto top up logic and it appears a race condition has occurred.  It clearly couldn't do an auto top up when the card details showed an expired card.  So if I change the card details as a result and this causes an auto-top up to occur (as I was told), then why did a second auto-top up occur.  At that point my balance was about £18.

So what happens now - I have just over £28.00 on my account and one month of allowance.  At the end of the month, it will start taking £1/day in charges for 19 days before before topping up again.  In other words I will have paid about £20 for a 7 week period as to opposed to my normal £10 for a 6 week period.

This seems extremely unfair and I am quite annoyed about it. 

[Cleoriff · Accepted solution]

Hi @Anonymous As this is an account based issue you really have to resolve it by talking to customer services. Dont use live chat. Ring between 8-8-30 and speak to someone http://www.o2.co.uk/contactus

You also may be better changing to a basic tariff....It is available on request. Ask them about this when you call

[MI5]

As you topped up a second time it will count towards your next bundle so it will renew on your anniversary date.

[Anonymous]

We had this with my wifes phone, the online and telephone people either didnt understand plain english or they were thick.   The way we resolved it was to cancel the auto top up until they had used all the credit then set the auto top up again.

O2s accounts dept leave a lot to be desired. Prior to me leaving O2 I was in credit and got an overdue threatening letter!!.  When I phoned a very helpfull chap immediately saw I was in credit and confirmed by email the threatening letter should not have gone out and yes, blamed it on a computer.   Computers only do what they are told, rubbish in, rubbish out

[Limey1978blc]

This has happened to me as well. My credit card was compromised somewhere online so my supplier issued a new one. After a long search I finally found the page on O2 to update my details. Almost immediately I received a text saying that a top up of £15 had been applied to my phone... It already had £15 credit on it...! I now had £30+ on my pay as you go sim. I also had £16.50 waiting in top up REWARDS that I was going to use towards my next top up...! So, I was about £46 in credits/top ups. I requested a refund as the top up had NOT been authorised in the first place. I had ONLY updated my credit card details, nothing else. They refused (of course!). 

The next day I called customer service and spoke to them about the unauthorised debit and was told I would have to go through the bank that issued my credit card. (After it had cleared.). So, today I rang the bank and they too have refused to refund my money as they say I cannot prove it was fraud because the top up is on my phone. I will be sending a complaint to O2 but judging by all the complaints on the forums here, there is probably no chance of a refund. I also want to REMOVE my credit card details from the site completely but can't even find out how to do that! 

[jonsie]

Unfortunately the card was used by yourself to top up the phone so no fraud was involved irrespective of the fact that you didn't want to top up, you in effect did so. Rules and regulations of credit card companies and O2 are quite clear and can be seen really enough by looking at their respective terms and conditions. 

To remove the card from o2's system you have to call customer service or simply request a new card from the issuing bank.