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Charged for data despite having 500MB data plan

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BKen
Investigator

Charged for data despite having 500MB data plan

On 9th October my €20 topup expired. I had €13.82 credit left so I bought a 500MB add-on. That left me with €8.82 balance. However I noticed today that my balance has gone to €0.

Looking through usage history I was charged €6.06 for 6144kB and €0.51 for 517kB for data on 16th October, but I would still have had data left as my account right now shows I still have 153.8MB remaining.

Why was I charged for this data? 

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

Best Answer
Anonymous
Not applicable

From my experience My3 takes hours to update. If you use up your 500MB it will take a few hours to register, I've gotten low data texts 3 hours after using up the add-on. 

 

If your phone's settings has a data usage tracker I'd recommend using that instead.

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12 REPLIES 12
LauraH
3 Mod Retired

@BKen Hhhhmmmm that's strange, I'd like to look into this further for you. Pop me a PM with your phone number, full name, address and date of birth to get the ball rolling 👌

 

 

A_C
Investigator
Investigator

This also happened to me, at the start of October, same issue ran out of credit, bought 500mb add-on, it took my credit still. 

I've been through the online chat, they said they resolved this issue but I didn't get my credit back.

Now I cannot even use the data bundle I've paid for, I keep getting a notification to sign in to the 3 network. 

I hope your issue gets resolved, good luck!

Sorry to rant on your thread, I had to get it off my chest, and since I found the same issue here as I had I'm putting this here rather than start my own thread on the same matter.

A_C
Investigator
Investigator

See my reply to OP. I have loads of screen shots to show my issue, can you help me too or should I start a new thread?
BKen
Investigator

That’s ok. I think this has happened a few times.

I PM’d you my details just now thanks
LauraH
3 Mod Retired

@BKen Thanks for that, I've just replied to your PM 👍

 

@A_C Will you also send me a PM with your phone number, full name, address and date of birth. I may need to forward these to our tech team, is that ok with you?

 

 

ar1
Investigator
Investigator

This has happened to me 4 times now in the past 3-4 months. I've talked to three support and each time they have returned my credit (after 3-4 days) without any additional refund for the service not provided. -The last time this happened (3 days ago), I had 100+MB of data left and 2 days. At this point my credit was gone, and I could no longer access the Internet, even though the plan was still active. My credit has not been refunded yet, so I have not been able to purchase another bundle to replace the last expired one (I'm not topping up again since I should have 14 euro credit). This credit has been promised to be refunded, but Three has denied any sort of refund for the 100MB/2 days of purchased data which was left on the plan (and for the other times this happened previously). So we're at a loss in the end of it - 
1. Lost service when we expected to have it (and paid for it) (not refunded)

2. Lost credit when we should have it (and denied access to it for 3/4+days) (refunded)

3. Not able to get service again for without paying three more money by topping up again (not compensated)

And finally not compensated for the continual problems with service (i'm not even able to contact support to raise a ticket, or contact anyone at all for that matter while i'm out when this happens)


To make matters worse, in my current support ticket i've been actively denied any sort of compensation, and not only that, i've been suggested to change plans. This is terrible advice since my current (legacy 20) plan is fine for me, but also this issue is related to the 500MB add-on. Support is basically saying "yeah we have problems, people are working on it. Instead of getting the service you're paying for now, why not pay us more and get a slightly different one that you don't need?"

This hasn't been the first problem with credit being taken this year (and last). I've had problems with getting charged double for google play purchases multiple times (and taking many days for my credit to be returned, again with no additional compensation), and i've also had issues with incorrect/deceptive advertising regarding EU roaming charges which took FOREVER to get to the end of, no support person really understood what was wrong, and i was only refunded a fraction of the credit that was lost.

This is really putting me at the edge of my seat for switching providers, and the only reason I haven't already is because it's effort. Right now I've been put through more pain talking to support to get these issues resolved than I would ever have switching providers many times.

 

Edit:

Upon additional complaints (and suggestions of taking my service elsewhere) I've been offered 5 euro credit (the best they can do). No compensation for the last 3 times it happened, and no promise of compensation to any other customers who this happens to. 

I've been told that this is a known problem with the legacy 20 euro top up plan that it looks like myself and @BKen  are on. This has been handled very badly - 

1. Customers on the plan have NOT been informed of this issue

2. Customers are required to contact support every time this happens

3. Customers are told to move to a different plan to "solve" this problem since it's a known problem for the plan. (three should be doing whatever they can to guarantee us the service we have paid for. It's ridiculous to try and move users onto another plan (we can't move back), and charge us more, when they're not providing what was offered for another)

4. Customers are not compensated at all without a lot of complaints (So any other customers who have this problem be sure to get your compensation)

Edit 2:
Asking how they're going to handle this for effected customers in the future given that it's a known issue, they offered 10 euro at best - turns out that the best of 5 euro wasn't their best after all. They didn't answer any questions i had.

 

Edit 3: An hour or so of further talking expressing my problems with the process and attempting to escalate the issue to hear back from people higher up regarding the support process, I was told that the chat could not be escalated, and that I could provide feedback in the contact form on the website for my "feedback about wrongly charged for data for the last 4-5 months".  Obviously not understanding what my feedback was about, upon clarifying this, and asking if this conversation could be saved to be picked up by someone else, I was again told to ask on the contact form, and then told that the conversation could not be saved into a support ticket, (any personal data could easily be redacted) and that I would have to spend time talking to someone else through exactly the same thing I've been discussing with this support person for the past 2-3 hours. (with no guarantee i can get any response from anyone else higher up in the support chain)


I did not receive the 10 euro credit and at this point I'm looking into alternative mobile networks. The only reason I'm still typing here and hoping to get traction on this issue is that I want to help Three solve this support problem and primarily give other customers transparency about what issues they may have with the service, and how bad it really is.

Hopefully I can get some sort of helpful response from someone in Three here and get in contact with someone who can actually do something about this problem.

 

(and i'm fed up of having to provide my name, address, DOB every single time... this account is linked to my three account - you know who I am. Same with the three app. Why ask security questions at all when someone with access to the account can just look at previous messages and see the answers?) This is laughable.

LauraH
3 Mod Retired

@ar1 Hello and thanks for posting and giving me so much detail on your query, it's really useful. I get your frustration on this matter and I can assure you that our tech team is working on this as a priority and although I don't have a timeframe on when this investigation will be completed, I am happy to take a look at your account and your query into your refund and credit. Before I can access your account it's imperative that I receive your details in PM for validation purposes. Pop me a PM with your phone number, full name, address and date of birth to get the ball rolling 👍

 

Hi. I have the same issue and I've only noticed it this month because I was charged €6 3 times in a row. I thought at first I might have been some dodgy competition or 'service' text's of something but looking at my account history for the last three months the charges are there also. It only goes back as far as Sep so I don't know how often these were applied. I found this thread by searching 'Charged €6.06 for 6144 Kbytes' and found others had the same.  

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