Expat Community > India

Pendrive
Joined 2019
Posts: 1

Vodafone problems

5 years ago

Hello everyone - I am wondering if anyone has some advice about Vodafone. I worked in Mumbai and left on 31 October 2018 on a late night flight. On the way to the airport I went with an Indian friend to a Vodafone office to deactivate my postpaid SIM card, and paid off the final balance. We were in the shop for about an hour. A man there typed an email message presumably to somewhere online cancelling (I thought) the SIM card.

After leaving I began receiving emails from Vodafone asking for money for my account. I wrote about 10 times in total saying I had gone to the shop in person, paid off the bill, and closed my SIM and account. Someone different wrote back each time and told me it hadn't been closed. One person told me someone at the shop had told them I had only visited to find out my balance - which was ridiculous since I could have found in under a minute online of course. Then, completely crazily, I was told they had contacted 'my wife' who had told them not to cancel the SIM card. As I pointed out, I'm female and single; and don't have a wife. And surely they couldn't discuss someone's account and do anything with it without any reference to an account holder? But this was apparently the reason why they didn't close the account and cancel the SIM, and why they wanted money for it.

I asked 4 or 5 times for their complaints process, and details of someone higher in the company, and was never sent anything. In the end I stopped responding because they had no interest it seemed in resolving anything at all, nor in having any kind of sensible conversation about anything. There seemed to be no process to do anything, nor answers to anything I asked - just continual demands for money.

Today I received a message from them telling me they had referred the matter to the Permanent Lok Adalat, at the end of April. They have used an address I never lived at when living in India; and as they were repeatedly told, I left there for good at the end of October last year - having gone to their shop in the first place on the way to the airport in order to leave.

Does anyone have any experience of anything like this? Or advice on it - particularly as I'm now on the other side of the world from India? I don't really know what this 'Permanent Lok Adalat' is to begin with. The whole thing seems to be just completely crazy.

Many thanks for any advice...

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