I had Auto Top-up enabled on my account for a long time, and it has worked fine taking funds from my debit card when needed. But a few weeks ago, my card was kept by an ATM for unknown reasons, so my bank issued a new card with a different number. Naturally, the next Auto Top-up failed, and I got an email saying my card details were incorrect. So I logged in, updated the details with the new card details, but it was rejected after the "verifying with your bank" step. Odd, I thought, so I tried to enter the details again. Same thing. I then tried with my credit card, same thing again. Since this was happening at the bank verification stage, and the failure page had the title "Fraud Declined", I called my bank to see what the problem was, thinking that there might be a security issue with my new card. After a lot of puzzled checking, they finally said they can see the transactions had been approved, but were then blocked by O2, and that I should contact them.
I rang O2, hold times were reported as greater than 30 minutes, so that was clearly not an option. I then tried the web chat, and got an agent who started looking into the issue. The agent asked me to verify the last 4 digits of the card used. I did that, and the agend said they didn't match. After a bit of confusion, it turns out the agent was looking for my old debit card details, which I had replaced with the new card's details and didn't know. I had clearly explained the situation to him, but he didn't seem that interested in what I was saying, since he insisted that he needed the old card details. Eventually he asked me to delete the Auto Top-up, set a new one up and try again. I had my doubts but went with it. When I did that, the card was rejected before it even opened the bank's checking page, and when I told him this, guess what... He asked me to confirm the last 4 digits again, and told me again that they were wrong because they weren't the old card's digits, resulting in us going around the very same circle again. Once I got him to understand (again) that it was a new card, he finally switched to the generic script of logging out and back in, deleting cache and cookies and so on. Pointless stuff, but I humoured him anyway. This at least got it back to the bank checking point, but it was still rejected after that.
At this point, I had spent well over half an hour going around in circles with someone who didn't know what he was doing and wasn't paying attention to what I was saying, and had wasted £4 of my very little remaining credit (I am abroad for Christmas and was unsure if I would be able to even top up at all) on the phone to the bank only to learn the issue was with O2 in the first place. I asked for the matter to be escalated so that it could be investigated properly, but I haven't received any details of a support ticket, or anything else on the matter since yesterday, so I suspect that request was ignored as well.
I appreciate that support staff are probably overwhelmed with people with new Christmas phones, but that pressure could surely be reduced by having support staff understand their systems and with the ability to carry out necessary checks instead of wasting everyone's time. In the meantime, today I was able to do a single top-up with the debit card in question without any issues, but Auto Top-up still rejects my cards with the same report.
Sorry about the long post, but the web chat agent has ensured that I'm far more annoyed about this than I might otherwise have been.
TL;DR: Auto Top-up feature refuses to accept any cards I try to use. Bank has authorised the transaction so the issue is with O2. Web help agent clearly didn't know how to deal with the situation, but continued wasting my time regardless. I asked for an escalation yesterday but have received no confirmation or related communication today. Auto Top-up is still broken today, though manual top-up with the card works fine.
