Telstra Sneakily Renewing Phone Contracts?
Monday, December 29, 2008We've had another great Telstra service moment. My Wife's phone contract was up for renewal early January so she went into a Telstra shop to find out the exact date and they informed her the contract had been renewed in November, for another 2 years! Of course she hadn't renewed anything, and nobody from Telstra had even contacted her to solicit a renewal. The Telstra rep at the shop said it'd be a $400+ cancellation fee.
Ringing Telstra cleared it up prety quickly, the rep on the other end of the call was actually helpful, saying there were no 'notes' attached to the renewal so it was pretty clear it'd been setup without permission; cancelled the contract and waived the cancellation fee.
This sounded a little suspicious to me so I did some poking around and found a thread on Wirlpool from a guy with the same story, although he had to fight a little harder to get his cancellation. Anyone else heard of such a sneaky tactic?
I can't bare to think what might have happened had we not been alerted to the problem this early. We would have cancelled the account thinking the contract was up, then received a $400+ bill in the mail for early cancellation of a contract we never new existed. I expect this would be harder to fight Telstra for, and we could risk our credit rating doing so.
Needless to say we're happily leaving Telstra for good.
4 Comments
I wonder if it's call centre staff renewing random contracts to meet their targets... dodgy.
Happened to me not long ago I rang up Telstra and they waived the fee for me as well.
Hi I just got the same thing. I canceled my phone plan with Telstra and switched to Optus because Telstra wouldn't offer me a better deal. Anyways my contract was more than 1 year finished and i got sent a bill with a $327 cancellation fee. Telstra did waive the fee when i called up but I strongly believe Telstra should be fined for making up dodgy contracts. If we don't sign for some extra years we shouldn't be receiving these nasty bills.
I went to telstra because the reception from vodaphone kept dropping out two or three times twixt home and work.
I had two months to go on my plan with vodaphone,they said that will be a penalty of $2100(this is on a $199per month plan.)
Might have to do the consumer affairs excercise.
Telstra reception is impeccable.