Ch10: Footnotes
What is Ownership?
Natural Size Limit
A Cancerous System
Exclusive Minority
Minimising Costs
Cause of Conflict
The Unfree Market
Geo-Constraints
Monopoly Cliques
Negative Equity
Limited Liability
A Mere Resource
Business Flow Model
Maximising Profit
Wealth For The Few
Student Accomm.
Trickledown Theory
NULL
My son is 40 years old. He has a mental illness, which is characterised by delusion, paranoia and panic. It renders him socially vulnerable. His Mental Health Assertive Outreach Team has been working with him for many years trying to give him the confidence and ability to function as normally as possible within society. This has involved guiding him in how to buy things from shops and to travel independently. In a benign society, this could well have worked. Unfortunately, present society is far from benign, with the result that my son has fallen victim, in both these endeavours, to what appears to me to be the ruthless commercial exploitation of a vulnerable person.
My son's traumatic experience regarding independent travel is not discussed here. It is covered elsewhere. Here is discussed his unfortunate experience in attempting to buy an entry-level pay-as-you-go smartphone from the Vodafone shop at 2A South Street, Bishops Stortford, Hertfordshire CM23 3AT and how he appears to have been subsequently what would be colloquially termed 'stitched up' into buying three new mobile phones and two 2-year telephone service contracts running in parallel. Each contract has its own separate telephone number.
Because of his mental illness, my son cannot work. He has tried and tried to find something he can gainfully do but it just doesn't work. Consequently, he has to be content with living on a penury level of Social Security 'Benefit'. His mother is mentally ill and is in her 80th year. I, his father, live overseas. His sister lives 385 miles away in Edinburgh. His brother lives in Canada. My son finds it difficult to make and keep friends, although he has two permanent friends who are reasonably local and with whom he keeps in regular contact. He also converses at length with me, his father, several times a day via WhatsApp.
In present-day society, the de facto means by which people maintain contact with each other is the mobile phone. Everybody is simply expected to have one. Whoever does not have one is thereby isolated from society, or at least, marginalised. It is becoming increasingly difficult to perform day-to-day social and administrative transactions without one. And pressure is building. The mobile phone is no longer a refusable option but a functional necessity. As such, it is now a necessary part of social infrastructure.
Being on Social Security 'Benefit' yet having to have a mobile phone to maintain his minimum necessary and sufficient socio-economic functionality, my son set out to buy the cheapest option. This was a basic smartphone with a pay-as-you-go chip so that he could not run up an account that was beyond his means to pay. So, sometime in 2018, he went to the Vodafone shop at 2A South Street, Bishops Stortford, Hertfordshire CM23 3AT and asked for the cheapest smartphone, that could also run WhatsApp, with a pay-as-you-go SIMM.
But the Vodafone salespeople must have 'seen him coming' so to speak. my son said that the salesperson in the Vodafone shop told him that Vodafone did not provide pay-as-you-go services and that he would have to opt for a basic monthly contract for a minimum running period of 24 months. He naively took them at their word and accepted the 24-month contract, which included the neccesary handset.
This contract, so it seems, included calls and Internet usage up to certain limits, beyond which, extra charges were added for any usage in excess of the limits. My son could not relate his calls and web surfing to measures of call and data transfer usage. He fell victim to so-called 'Premium Rate' number traps of which he was unaware. And he got the corresponding shock when his monthly bill arrived each time. This is the reason he had specifically asked for a pay-as-you-go service.
I see from Vodafone's web site that Vodafone does indeed provide a pay-as-you-go option. Perhaps the salespeople at 2A South Street, Bishops Stortford, Hertfordshire CM23 3AT were telling the truth. Perhaps pay-as-you-go was not sold at that particular shop. In that case, they should have told my son that they did not sell pay-as-you-go at that shop and tell him where he could buy a Vodafone pay-as-you-go service. Notwithstanding, I think that in all probability, the Vodafone salespeople simply lied to him in order to gain the far superior commission for selling a monthly account.
My son accidentally broke the tiny USB socket that smartphones have for charging the battery among other things. So, on 16 August 2019, he went back to the Vodafone shop to ask for the USB socket to be repaired or replaced. The salesperson told him that the phone was irreparable and that his only option was a new phone. This was a lie. The Vodafone website tells how to request transit packaging and how to send a damaged phone for repair. So he reluctantly bought another phone. He did not have enough money to buy the phone. He therefore accepted and signed what he thought was a mandate to add to his monthly bill staged payments for the new phone. He paid an initial £20 towards the new phone.
My son said he could not manage the account payments as they were and asked, at that time, for the account to be changed to pay-as-you-go. They told him that he could buy a pay-as-you-go SIMM but that he would have to continue with the contract until the end of the year 2020. Thus he took a new phone and a new SIMM, which he was given to believe was the pay-as-you-go SIMM for use after the contract had run out at the end of December 2020.
His next monthly bill was a double whammy. It was double what he had previously been paying. He did not know why. That is when he asked his sister for help.
When my daughter visited my son at Christmas 2019, she went with him to the Vodafone shop at 2A South Street, Bishops Stortford, Hertfordshire CM23 3AT concerning the impossible amounts that my son was being charged each month. They were attended by a blond woman called Rebecca.
When they left the shop, my daughter was under the impression that the Vodafone staff had reverted my son's account back to a single monthly plan [with the excess usage facility removed] + handset.
On 22 October 2020, my son went to the Vodafone shop to get a cracked screen repaired or replaced. He was told by the staff that the phone could not be repaired and that he would have to buy a new one, the cheapest of which cost £150. He bought the new phone for which he paid in full in cash.
At this point, my son had three phones: one with a broken or loose USB socket, one with a cracked screen [which he is still paying for on the account] and the new cheap one that works. Of course, the Vodafone staff in the shop had lied to him again. I see from the Vodafone web site that screens can be replaced and gives instructions on how to return a phone for such a repair.
My son was out of his depth with the monthly charges from Vodafone and the cash payment he had made for the third new phone. He had to eat. He had to pay for gas, electricity and water.
Consequently, on Monday 07 December 2020 he went to his bank and cancelled the direct debit payment orders to Vodafone. On Tuesday 08 December 2020, Vodafone cut off his phone service.
My son did not have a clue as to how to access his so-called 'My Vodafone' web area. He did not even know where to find the device [IMEI] number and serial number of his phone or his account number. He did not know how to conduct the complicated rigmarole of accessing the Vodafone website and setting up his access to his 'My Vodafone' area. Consequently, he could not find out what plan he was on or any details of the contracts he was 'under'.
On a pay-as-you-go service, he would not have needed to do any of this.
After much arduous long-distance conversation, I eventually managed to successfully instruct my son on how to open his phone and find the device number and serial number. What proved confusing was that the phone appeared to have two device numbers because it had two SIMM holders. He eventually found his account number from a receipt he had left at his mother's house.
I tried to register him on the Vodafone website so that he [we] could access his 'My Vodafone' area. This was indeed problematic because the Vodafone security system sent a security code to my son's phone that I had to enter on the Vodafone website. After several failed attempts, we finally managed. I told my son via WhatsApp when I was going to try to register him on the Vodafone website and to stand by for an SMS message to arrive with the security code. I told him to write down the security code then immediately call me via WhatsApp and tell me the security code. Finally, after a few failed attempts, it worked. Not bad since we are over 8,500km apart. I was then able to enter my son's 'My Vodafone' area to try to navigate its labyrinthian sequence of links to find details of his contract.
What a surprise. I discovered that he had not just one, but two telephone service contracts. Each one had a separate telephone number. My son knew his existing number, which was on the first contract. But he knew nothing of the second telephone number pertaining to the second contract. Both contracts were in PDF files.
The two contracts were both dated 16 August 2019. They both had 'signatures' purporting to be my sons'. However, when printed out at 100% scale on A4 paper, the signatures measured 14 millimetres long by 2.8 millimetres high. An elf couldn't write that small. It is obvious that my son had not physically signed either of these contracts.
Thus it would appear that, when my daughter had visited the Vodafone shop with him at Christmas 2019 to get his account back to a single monthly plan [with the excess usage facility removed] + handset, the Vodafone staff had altered nothing. Both the original contracts were still running and had [in December 2020] been so doing for one year and four months. My son was still being charged monthly for a telephone number he was not using and did not even know existed. The SIMM, which he had been given to understand was a pay-as-you-go, is still in its wrapping.
From what I have been able to glean so far, it seems to me that:
The first contract, which was due to terminate in December 2020 had been re-dated to run for a minimum period of 24 months from 16 August 2020.
In place of what he had been given to believe was a pay-as-you-go SIMM, he had been saddled with a new monthly account contract with a new telephone number to run concurrently with the first contract from 16 August 2019 for a minimum period of 24 months.
My son has not opened the second SIMM package because, as he understood it, it would not be necessary until the account of the first SIMM terminated in December 2020. Consequently, Vodafone is charging him for a second [totally pointless] account that he did not even know he had and for which he has absolutely no use.
I surmise that two-SIMM phones are for business executives and other high-fliers who want both a business number and a private number on a single device for convenience. My son is not one of these. He is a vulnerable mentally ill adult who is existing on 'Benefit' by himself in a one-bedroom flat. What possible use would he have for two phone numbers on the same device? Especially since he specifically asked for an entry-level smartphone with a pay-as-you-go SIMM, which the Vodafone salespeople apparently told him they did not sell.
The 'signatures' trouble me. Obviously, the signatures that appear on these two contracts were not physically written there by my son. They are printed in printer toner not ink or ballpoint pen. They cannot be other than enormously down-scaled facsimiles of my son's real signature obtained from some external means, such as a scan of his signature on another piece of paper of a pen tablet, which was then transferred onto the PDF images of the contracts.
Such a facsimile of a person's signature can be transferred onto any document, known or unknown to the signer and which the signer may or may not have seen, read or even be aware of. In fact, my son was not aware of this second contract, nor was he aware that the first contract had, as it would appear, been re-dated. This so-called 're-dated' contract could possibly be a new contract replacing the original with the facsimile of my son's original signature copied to it.
It is obvious that these two contracts are wholly inappropriate for my son, and are a real and present cause of financial hardship for him. They are not what he asked for. He was given the impression that the second thing he signed for was for a pay-as-you-go SIMM when the contract upon which the facsimile of his signature was placed was for a second parallel monthly telephone service, which was of no use or benefit to him.
The technical ease with which a facsimile of a person's signature can be seamlessly placed on any document could be an irresistible temptation for one with this facility to commit fraud. It appears to me that it is this to which my mentally vulnerable son has fallen victim at the hands of an unbridled imperative for self gain.
From what I read in the relevant blogs, this kind of slimy practice by telecom corporations is far from uncommon the world over, especially with regard to vulnerable people. We are therefore considering gathering support to mount a Group Litigation Order against Vodafone to get compensation for those who have been so adversely affected by this kind of practise.