British telecom regulator Ofcom has imposed a fine of £2.7 million on mobile operator EE for overcharging its customers by breaking a billing rule on two occasions.
ALSO READ: Ofcom statement on EE
Ofcom said its investigation showed that EE twice breached one of Ofcom’s important billing rules –General Condition 11.1 PDF, 449.4 KB , which is designed to ensure customers are charged correctly for the services they receive.
On 16 September 2015, Ofcom received a notification about extraordinary performance failure from Tuv Suv BABT, a company that approves EE’s metering and billing system. EE, in 2008, instructed its third-party data clearing house to remove the 44 UK international dialling code from the records of customer calls made to certain short code numbers, including EE’s customer service number 150.
Ofcom investigation found that EE’s billing system interpreted the leading 1 digit as the international dialling code for the United States between 1 July 2014 and 20 July 2015.
EE customers who called the company’s 150 customer services number while roaming within the EU were incorrectly charged as if they had called the United States.
EE charged £1.20 per minute, instead of 19p per minute. As a result, EE overcharged around £245,700 at least 32,145 customers
Ofcom said its investigation found that EE’s carelessness or negligence contributed to billing errors. Though EE did not aim to make money from its billing mistake, it decided not to reimburse the majority of affected customers until Ofcom intervened.
EE wrongly decided it couldn’t identify the people it overcharged and was proposing to give their money to charity.
Despite making it free to call or text the 150 number from within the EU from 18 November 2015, EE billed 7,674 customers up until 11 January 2016. EE overcharged these customers £2,203.33.
Lindsey Fussell, consumer group director at Ofcom, said: “EE didn’t take enough care to ensure that its customers were billed accurately. This ended up costing customers thousands of pounds, which is completely unacceptable.”