TIO Annual Report 2005/06

Case Studies

Unauthorised transfer

The complaint
The complainant’s 11-year-old daughter received a letter from a service provider informing her that she had a contract with it. The complainant did not want the service to be with this particular provider and contacted it to have the matter investigated but no action was taken.

TIO response
The TIO referred the case to a senior complaint-handling department at the company where the complainant was told that her daughter had agreed to the transfer in a phone conversation* with a telemarketing representative. The complainant was also promised that the transfer would be reversed. The TIO then escalated the matter after the complainant contacted it again to advise that the reversal had not taken place and that she had not been given an opportunity to listen to the voice recording of the phone conversation in question, which the company confirmed it had kept. The TIO asked the company to provide a copy of the voice recording and address the issues raised in the complaint.

The outcome
The provider agreed that the voice recording featured someone other than the account holder and apologised to the complainant. The service was transferred back to the chosen provider and all charges in connection with the transfer were waived.

*Consumers may authorise to have their phone account transferred over the phone but under ACIF’s Customer Transfer Code, companies must make a voice recording of the authorisation and keep the recording for at least two years. For a transfer to be correctly authorised, the Customer Transfer Code requires that an “authorised customer” give “informed consent”. Complaints about a person not being the authorised customer often arise where an employee of a business receives a telemarketing call and agrees to transfer the landline service.

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