Mystery roaming charges from O2

[jjoohhnn]

Hi,
So I went to the US in April and had my O2 phone with me. It had mobile data enabled (I think), but roaming off. O2 charged me the £7.50 roaming charge on 4 of the 11 days. On querying this it was for “premium rate text messages”. I didn’t send or receive any text messages. O2 thankfully refunded the charges but googling a bit it seems like Visual Voicemail or iMessage might send silent messages to activate itself on the network and this could be related to the charges. So beware of these if you don’t intend to use your phone abroad, it could still induce charges!

john

[Blair Waldorf Salad]

Reminds me of the time 02 Ireland laid out their roaming tariff oddly, such that calls made while in the USA meant to cost €0.99 per minute were expressed as 0.99 under a heading of Euro cent. I sent them my bill the following month, circling all the charges where I’d been charged 99c per minute and claimed that under their tariff it should have been less than 1/10th of a cent per minute. The sneaky buggers updated their webpage 2 days later then wrote back to suggesting I was mistaken as their webpage had only ever said € not € cent. I then produced a saved version of their webpage from my travel dates. Refund provided 😎

[freckles]

I get odd bits and pieces with them too, even though I turn mobile data off and have roaming off as well when I’m outside their European zone. Just back from Turkey and small amounts of overseas data have popped up. I’ve challenged O2 on it before and all they can suggest is that some app or other is momentarily connecting. It’s only ever a few pennies here and there as I don’t have the O2 travel bolt on which would charge a flat £6 a day for ANY usage. Annoying when you do everything possible to avoid charges, but I’ve given up asking for them to be refunded.