02 charging me for media messages I did not send

[Anonymous]

New Years eve, I wrote and sent text messages wishing Happy New Year to 34 of my friends ( all saved on my contact list) The message contained no special characters ( not even a smiley) and it was just PLAIN TEXT. Last week I had the shock of my life when the bill was issued for £59.50 for what they say 204 picture messages I had sent on New years eve. I had sent only 34 messages ( well within my text allowance) but dont know how the number came to 204 messages and also dont know how all this got converted to picture messages. I contacted O2 and they said it was because I was using iPhone and that my contacts were synced with facebook. So if the contacts had email address saved, automatically my handset would convert all the messages to picture message. How was I suppose to know that? I had sent similar messages in the past but I was not charged for it. So why this time? I was told that this was due to some update done by Apple in December. Now , I, an 02 customer for more than 7 years, is being charged for something that i thought i was doing free within my allowance , becuase of a technical issue between 02 and Apple. As a gesture of goodwill 02 offered to waive half of the charge- yes, I appreciate the guesture, but I still think it is unfair to charge me £30 for 34 messages I sent and got converted to multiple picture messages ( my friends told me they recieved like 6 messages from me that night, but i had only sent one !!) due to no fault of mine. What do you think?

[jonsie]

Quite a number of people have been stung for this unfortunately and quite a few threads on the subject. One such thread below:

http://community.o2.co.uk/t5/Apple-iOS-Devices-iPhone-iPad/ios6-Defaulting-to-MMS-messages/m-p/37251...

[Anonymous]

wonder if all the people that got stung were on contract or payg

[adamtemp64]

the clue is in the wording used "Bill" only on contract do you get a bill

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the replies. I want to highlight that I did not use more characters on the text than normal. And I am surprised to know that there were other people who got affected at the same time with the same issue and O2 is still not accepting this as a technical fault? Why are the customers getting charged?

[MI5]

The apple software converts the messages if you have the subject field and MMS turned on. Unfortunately O2 can't control how you use your phone and I think you did well to get a 50% refund. See post #28 in this thread http://community.o2.co.uk/t5/Apple-iOS-Devices-iPhone-iPad/ios6-Defaulting-to-MMS-messages/td-p/3725...

[Anonymous]

I did not have subject field turned on. But MMS was on. But how are we supposed to know this will happen when we were not notified of such changes. I had sent similar messages before. If this was due to something that Apple did, then O2 should take it up with Apple to recover the costs and not pass it over to the innocent customer

[jonsie]

Have to say I agree up to a point. This never used to happen on non-smart phones and android phones usually warn you when a message is converted to mms and perhaps O2 help and support pages can make it clearer about group texts being converted to mms. I know it's in there but it's not easy to find for the average consumer.

[Liquid]

Was it a group text?

[jonsie]

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@Liquid wrote:
Was it a group text?

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Sending the same sms to various receipients.