Thursday, October 29, 2009

Tough Lessons and a Mom on the Warpath

I wrote earlier about Annika's lack of mobile phone money... that she went through it in a matter of days. Well, seems as though I was mistaken about her usage. Apparently, she answered an SMS on the 21st of August, and since then she has been bombarded with SMS:s from a company (Funmobile - SMS 72238) with a monthly fee and a per-SMS cost that she has been paying, without realizing it.

She got a new phone on Friday (numbers were falling off the old one) and we brought it with us to Switzerland on Saturday. We scared her so much about SMSing and calling from foreign countries that we know she hasn't made a single call, or sent a single SMS. Suddenly, she got a "low money on account" warning, and was in floods of tears. "I haven't done anything" she kept saying. She had 189 kr on Saturday... 17 kr today. I checked her SMS list, and she had received more than 5 from that number, each with a cost. That makes more than 400 SEK ($57) that she has lost over the past two months.

So, I called (pity the poor customer service person who has to answer my call) and they have supposedly cancelled the service. I have also written to them to ask for my/her money back, and have reported them to Konsumentverket and Etiskarådet. She is only 10 years old. ARRRGGGGHHH!!!

1 comment:

Leigh said...

An update on the whole phone saga... I had complained that she shouldn't be allowed to "buy" questions since she is under 18, but since she is too young to have her own phone, she is under my name. Therefore, the company has no responsibility to check her age. However, after vociferous complaints, we did receive a refund - 762 kr came back to us after a few months of waiting. And now she is well aware of the potential costs of her phone. So aware, in fact, that she never calls me... just sends an SMS "call me"...