Andrew Speakman

Orange are the second mobile company I will probably never use again after this.

I decided to get a new phone and transfer my orange contract number to orange pay pray as you go. I don’t use my phone much and the free line rental offers can be hard work, remembering to send back the right bill and voucher every 3 months, but they’ve always worked for me in the past. What made my mind up against another cashback deal was when I was looking into them recently and read that things were about to get a lot harder, with the stores using all sorts of ways to try wriggling out of giving cashback. It might just be roumor, but this time I can’t be bothered.

So I looked at the pay as you go packages on offer, and the orange one seemed to be reasonable, and they had a phone that I thought was ok for a good price. I bought online at orange.co.uk and decided to make my life easier by buying credit at the same time. The phone arrived, I activated it online, and waited for my £50 credit become available.

This is where things started to get complicated. No credit appeared. I called Orange, and after going through the usual digit fandango spoke to a person who told me that my phone wasn’t properly activated or registered, I forget which, so I would not get the credit yet. So I went through a similar process to the one online, giving a new passcode etc. All done, still the credit didn’t appear. A day or so later I fandangoed and waited in a queue again with Orange’s new miss Essex call computer and was told that because I’d bought my credit online I would have to wait 21 days for the credit to appear on my phone. ‘You see it’s to do with the system and security and distance selling rules innit’. I spoke to countless people, probably in countless continents, all of them telling me a different story, whilst I repeated the same story. It was as if no-one had ever bought credit with an orange pay as you go phone from orange.co.uk before. The scary thing was that none of them knew how much credit I’d bought and I was asked to do silly things like fax a copy of my bank statement showing proof that the £50 for the credit had come out of my account (which it had). Oh dear.

I kept calling, I asked to return my handset, to which the poor person at Orange reacted with horror, sounding like they were almost in tears. Eventually I got the credit, but it took more than two weeks. I have also repeatedly being asking for a receipt including the £50 credit I bought. This was in October. So far I have received 3 receipts, none of which show that I bought any credit.