New cap on bills for stolen mobiles falls short

How does this prevent a thief from using a stolen SIM card? It’s the stolen SIM card that’s the issue here, not the stolen phone.

As I understand it you can ask for your own limit on a credit card.

I use PAYG so unauthorised use not a problem as I rarely have more than £10 in credit. You are responsible for looking after your own phone of course, but putting an upper limit on call charges will depend upon how much you use yor phone, won’t it? Putting on a limit may prevent you using your phone for the remainder of a month if you have higher usage than expected without it being stolen.

My broadband provider has a limit on my monthly landline phone calls before it advises me. Never used the limit but seems sensible.

Given the choice I would set my cap at £10 to limit the charge if my phone was stolen. That would enable me to call a costly number in emergency. Other calls are covered by the tariff. I certainly don’t relish paying £100 for calls if my phone was stolen.

When I got a couple of credit cards over 40 years ago, I set a low limit for one of them, which is the card that I use routinely. It means that if anything goes wrong, my maximum loss is limited, notwithstanding whatever legal protection I may have.

wavechange, I’m not sure how you differentiate between normal calls and “stolen” calls before you report, and where your £10 cap fits in. A contract can still be used after it has been stolen and rack up a big bill, unless the proposed provider’s cap is in place if you report it quickly as stolen? have I missed something here?

Malcolm – What I would like is to limit the charge for calls to £10 if my phone gets stolen. I suspect that many others on ‘unlimited’ tariffs for normal calls would want this too. I simply want the protection that I used to have with a PAYG phone, which you mentioned earlier. Maybe users should be required to enter the SIM PIN if they want to make a chargeable.

Perhaps those on “inclusive” contracts should only be allowed to make calls up to their “free” monthly limit, and then buy extra in advance if needed. Those on monthly tariffs could place a limit on their bill without them again buying in advance. PAYG is much simpler, but pricey. Perhaps we should all be on PAYG but at fairer rates!

Like having a water meter, PAYG concentrates the mind on the necessity and duration of calls, and on whether a text message would do. I don’t regard PAYG calls as pricey because I make so few. People who cannot avoid making a lot of calls, or lengthy or long-distance ones, are obviously better off on a contract but, as NFH frequently points out, the sting is in the unused [and un-carry-overable] minutes priced into the bundle [minutes, note – not per second as mobile phone use was originally charged; we’ve lost that battle!].

Malcolm – There is another good reason for users having to take action if they reach their ‘free’ monthly limit. The charges for continued use can be very high indeed.

I am happy paying 45 pence a day for unlimited calls on my mobile because I often make long calls with people who don’t have a landline, for example where they work between offices. When landline to mobile calls become cheap, as we have been told will happen, I will probably go back to PAYG. My emergency phone that I keep in the car is on the Three network and calls cost a sensible 3p per minute.

When I couldn’t fnd my mobile phone last year I had no idea whether it had been ‘lost’ or ‘stolen’ – probably the former in the circumstances. I didn’t worry about the cost of reporting it to Vodafone in order to stop unauthorised use. It was PAYG and there was probably only £10-20 credit on it – Vodafone probably still has all or most of that. I thought the phone might turn up somewhere but it hasn’t and I forgot all about it until now; perhaps the credit balance is transferable to the replacement phone.

My understanding is that under the T&Cs for PAYG phones, you will lose your credit if no calls or top-ups have been made in the last 180 days. The phone may be inactivated sooner but will reactivate it on request.

I had an idea that was the situation. Since the credit retained is far less than the phone I lost was worth it’s gone to the back of my mind again.

Just to clarify, all UK networks will extend a PAYG SIM card’s validity from the date of the last balance change (increase or decrease). For nearly all networks, the validity period is 6 months from the last balance change. Giffgaff allows some additional means such as 0800 calls (free on giffgaff) and multiple incoming calls.

Even if there is a validity period of six months, PAYG phones can become inactive before then, requiring the user to request that they are activated. It would be useful to have a link to reliable information about the policy of different companies because many including myself have a PAYG phone for emergency use. I once had a PAYG phone inactivated after 30 days.

Perhaps at the same time the tale of Frances’s daughter could be fleshed out. I understand it makes astonishing and dramatic reading but given we have no details of whether this was over weeks or a single day, or when the loss was reported , any sense of outrage is tempered by the knowledge we have only been dealt with half , or less, of the story.

Anne, why should Virgin be liable for “ANY LOSS INCURRED AS A THE RESULT OF FRAUD“? Surely Virgin should be liable only for losses that exceed your desired cap of £50, irrespective of whether they implement that cap.

I should try again, I got mine capped at £50 . One gets very different results depending on who one speaks to as I have found in the past. Wanted it capped far lower but they would not go any lower than £50.

Noel, when you make an outgoing roaming call within a visited country, your call does not cross any borders or go via the UK. It is only incoming roaming calls that are routed via the UK, because the caller has to call your UK number. Therefore Orange Botswana billed Orange UK for the domestic national calls within Botswana at its wholesale rate, which should be similar to what a local consumer pays. Orange UK then marked this up this wholesale charge by several thousand percent.

I remember the days when roaming in Singapore on an Orange SIM card, I could make outgoing calls within Singapore for which Orange UK charged me 6p/min, which included a 35% markup on top of the Singapore network’s wholesale charge. Then Orange UK decided in 2002 to hike its roaming charges to standardised uniform rates of £1.30/min for outgoing calls. Total rip-off.

You might not be feeling very well-disposed towards your friend after that experience, especially if they haven’t made a contribution towards your loss. You have suffered a form of theft for which there probably isn’t any protection or insurance. I agree with NFH about Orange’s rates being extortionate and, perhaps, looking at it with hindsight, you should have tried to continue negotiating in the hope of getting a further reduction. Now you are in the hands of debt collectors and they will be adding their charges at every step and turrn. Citizen’s Advice might be able to take the case up again with Orange and at least help you draw up a viable repayment plan to get the debt collectors off your back.

John is right about negotiating a further reduction. Given that the usage was stolen and not incurred for your benefit, Orange UK could expect you to reimburse them only for their losses, i.e. the wholesale charge that they paid to Orange Botswana. The same principle applies you damage something in a shop. The shop can expect you to pay only for its losses (i.e. the wholesale cost) and not any profit on top (i.e. the retail price), as well as the profit on any consequentially lost sales resulting from temporarily insufficient stock. Given that the profit on consequentially lost sales doesn’t apply to a service, Orange UK could not expect you to pay any profit on top of its wholesale charge.

Noel, unfortunately I think this £100 limit still wouldn’t protect you in this circumstance. It only applies when you’ve reported a stolen SIM card within 24 hours. If I understand correctly from your post, you didn’t even realise your SIM card was stolen until after you’ve received the phone bill.