When I received my monthly bill from O2, I was shocked to see a payment of £914 had been taken. I phoned customer service and was told this was because of an international phone call I had made to Tunisia.
I don’t know anyone in Tunisia. I then logged into My O2 and discovered a fraudulent call lasting almost five hours.
I spoke to two different O2 agents who acknowledged the fraud. I also contacted my bank but it could not help because the charge was included in my monthly bill and it could not override my payment agreement with O2.
In October, I received an email from O2 confirming a refund but, when it did not arrive, I kept phoning and eventually was informed the offer had not been sanctioned.
This call should have been flagged by O2 before it took such a large amount of money. I rarely use my phone to make calls and never international ones.
I have been an O2 customer for more than 15 years and will end my contract when this is resolved.
EH, Loughborough
You shared your billing history with me and it showed an expensive call such as this was extremely out of character and should have been flagged by O2 before it took such a large payment.
After I contacted O2, it looked into the matter and thinks you may have been the target of a “wangiri scam”. Wangiri is a Japanese word that means “one ring and drop”.
Fraudsters ring from a premium, or international, number and quickly hang up, leaving a missed call, in the hope that a victim will call back. They then try to keep them on the line to run up big call charges, which they profit from.
It is not clear what happened here, as you say you did not answer this call, but given that it was five months ago, too much time has passed to delve deeper.
O2 says: “We’ve taken action to fully refund EH after they fell victim to what we believe is a wangiri scam. If a customer receives a call out of the blue from an international or premium rate number they don’t recognise, we strongly advise they do not call back and report to us immediately if they believe it is a scam.”
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