Hi, I've recently dealt with a similar situation, and managed to get a full refund two weeks and a bunch of emails later. There's been £70 worth of charges on my O2 bill over the course of several months.
O2 said they couldn't do anything about that as there is a certain loophole such 'gaming' companies are taking advantage of. I've learnt that you can 'subscribe' to the gaming service by clicking 'Accept' on what looks like a cookies accept button when browsing the internet, by accidentally clicking on a link on a random pop up window, or by even clicking on a little cross trying to close a pop up window.
Based on a friend's experience, contacting your bank and trying to reclaim the amount of additional charges from the O2 won't help, as O2 will treat it as you not paying their bills and this will negatively affect your credit score.
Here're the steps I had to take to get a full refund. Hope someone will find this information useful.
1) Texted a stop message to the number mentioned in the texts you're getting charge updates from (STOP or STOP GAMERS depending on what the messages sent to you said).
2) Called O2 and asked to enable a Premium bar on my account to prevent similar subscriptions in the future, asked O2 for the contact email address and phone number of the company the charges are coming from.
3) Emailed the provided email address (for me it was customer.service@tap2bill.com).
4) Got a response saying that I need contact Stripey Giraffe directly - help@stripeygiraffe.co.uk, so I emailed them.
5) Got an email from claims@telcosupport.com, 'an independent helpdesk that resolves customer complaints on behalf of SB7 Mobile Limited (UK)' asking to submit the refund claim online and attach the phone bills affected. Submitted the claim.
6) Got a long formal BS template email from claims@telcosupport.com detailing how the company was operating within the law, how I must not have paid attention when subscribing, and how I may not know who else might have access to my phone and was playing their games on my phone. In that email they offered 'a good will refund' of 50% of the charges and provided a link that expires within several days.
7) Didn't use the refund link, but called SB7 Mobile Limited (UK) on 0330 134 0181 instead and said that if they refuse to give me a full refund, I was willing to take the matters to court. I asked to provide the following information for my court claim (as it appears at the Companies House): Company Name, Company Registered Address, Company Number, Company Phone and Email. They are legally obliged to provide this information. At that point the advisor said they would give me a full refund if I email my query and the affected phone bills to psa-gwrefunds@sb7mobile.com
😎 Emailed the query, got the same template email as in Point 6, but stating that the full refund will be issued.
A few notes I made in my email, that may be quite important while claiming the refund:
- I haven't knowingly subscribed to the company's services
- The company didn't make it clear that the charges would be added to my phone bill
- The company didn't make it clear that it was subscribing me to regular charges
- I've never accessed the game and never played it
It's a disgrace O2 allows such scam to happen to their customers, I'd been an EE customer for 9 years before and nothing like this ever affected me. From what I read, other networks have better measures of preventing such scams in place including two-step verification. I will seriously consider switching to another network when my contract with O2 expires.
Cheers & Good luck!
