Before you consider joining Vodafone please read this! My mum has been a loyal customer of Vodafone for 17 years. She has renewed a contract every two years and when I was 11 bought me my first mobile, a pay as you go with Vodafone. These phones eventually graduated onto contracts with mobiles as part of the payment plan. My Mum has degenerative spinal disease so cannot work and is tremendous amounts of pain every day. As I got older and started going out more both me and Mum decided that we needed reliable phones so that if I went out and Mum had a fall she could easily reach me. They are essential as I am now her full-time carer. In January 2016 the contract was renewed and we got shiny new Samsung galaxy S6 edges! As Mum was a loyal customer and had been with Vodafone for a long time she received a discount on the plan, the total for both phones was £43.52 a month. This discount was supposed to remain in place for the 2-year contract. In other words, up until January of this year. In November of 2016 the direct debit got cancelled by the bank, possibly due to lack of funds as Mum is disabled and cannot work. Normally if you do not pay your bill Vodafone restrict your service, yes? In our case they didn’t. From November of 2016 up until April of 2018 no payments were made and our service wasn’t restricted. We had no reason to doubt that the bill wasn’t going out as the phones never got restricted. Vodafone never sent a text, letter, email or even made a phone call to notify us that the bill was adding up. In addition to this the line rental increased from £43.52 for both lines to £43.50 for each line, £87 a month in total. Unfortunately, I have no idea when this was changed as Vodafone’s online billing records only go back 12 months, however in August of 2017 this change had already been made. Again, Vodafone failed to inform us of this. When we finally discovered this in the April of this year, the bill was around the £900 mark. My mum rang up to find out why this had happened and why Vodafone hadn’t notified us of the failure of billing. She was instantly blamed by Vodafone for not paying the bill and told that it was her fault. Our lines were also restricted. It was finally agreed after many hours of fighting that we would keep our phones and pay £45 a month. £14.25 per line rental totalling £28.50 a month. This is bringing the bill down by a whopping £16.50 a month. We are also now on SIM only contracts and with two and a half year old phones that are beginning to break down. After a lot of arguing we were finally put through Customer Relations and began speaking with a lady named Sheetal. She has since agreed that the discount was removed prematurely and has refunded us that money, £171 (she claimed it added up to), however I cannot find a refund of this amount on the account anywhere, instead one £130 in March (which is before we even found out about the bill) and one for £66 in May. When I asked Sheetal if she had compared the data usage of our phones against the months where there was no payments made she said she didn’t have the statements and that it would take 48-72 hours to get them and that she would ring us back on the Saturday. That was a week an’ half ago. We are still waiting for a return call from her. As of the 17th of August 2018 the bill is £707.59. Despite Mum paying the agreed amount of £45 a month we have had our mobile service frequently restricted. This happens at least twice a month. It has also happened while I’ve been out and heartbreakingly my mum had a fall, which in itself is not that uncommon, and normally she can reach me but since Vodafone had restricted our service she couldn’t call anyone and was stuck on the floor where she had fallen for over two hours. This left her in agony for several days and made me feel extremely guilty. I have since stopped going out in case it happens again. Two days ago, our service was again restricted despite the payment being made and again we rang up and had an argument with customer relations. Eventually our lines were reconnected and we were told we would receive a call from Sheetal today (30/8/18.) Instead we got a phone call from a man called Asif Shekh. He asked for Mum to pay the bill of over a three month payment plan, £200+ a month (forgive me for not working it out.) When Mum tried to explain what the she was disabled and that she would never be able to pay over three months he abruptly cut her off and very rudely said ‘Yes, I know that and your daughter helps you. I’ve read the notes.’ If he had read the notes, then he must have read that £45 is all we can afford a month. Why after reading that did he ask for a three month payment plan? When she explained again that she couldn’t pay that much and that £45 is all she can afford he threatened her with our phone numbers being deleted and being taken to court. This left my mum in tears fearing bailiffs. We are now waiting for Sheetal to ring tomorrow (hopefully.) Ultimately my argument with Vodafone is that they will not admit they made a mistake in failing to either restrict our lines when the bill stopped going through or send out a letter, make a phone call or send a text to inform us. It isn’t about the bill anymore, I just wish they would admit they were wrong and take ownership of the suffering they are putting my mum through. My advice to any potential Vodafone customer is to run to another company as fast as humanly possible. As if this is how they treat loyal customers I can only dread to think of how they would treat new customers.