Vodafone clobbered with £4.6m fine for flouting customer protections
Telecoms giant Vodafone has been hit with a £4.6m fine after it was judged by regulator Ofcom to have committed ‘serious and sustained breaches of consumer protection rules’.
This followed two separate Ofcom investigations which found that the business had misled 10,452 pay-as-you-go customers over top-up payments after failing to correctly credit their accounts, short changing them by a cumulative £150k over a 17-month period.
Vodafone was further judged to have broken rules on the correct processing of customer complaints, with the regulator finding that it had not issued velar guidance to its customer service agents on what constituted a complaint nor handled complaints in a ‘fair or timely manner’.
Both breaches saw Vodafone slapped down by a hefty fine after it was deemed to have ‘failed to act quickly enough to identify or address these problems,’
Apologising for these failures Vodafone said in a statement: "Everyone who works for us is expected to do their utmost to meet our customers' needs," Vodafone said.
"It is clear from Ofcom's findings that we did not do that often enough or well enough on a number of occasions. We offer our profound apologies to anyone affected by these errors."