EE customer hit with £1,000 phone bill after wrongly being placed on £1-a-minute tariff instead of 1p
Hayley Elton claims victory after a year-long battle against mobile giant EE
A LOYAL customer overcharged more than £1,000 by EE has blasted the mobile network operator after she claims she had to fight for a year to get her money back.
Hayley Elton, 43, was on a tariff that allowed her to call her mother in Spain for 1p a minute.
But in October 2015, unbeknown to her, she was placed on a plan that charged her £1 a minute instead of 1p.
Hayley, of Barnet, London, would ring her mother Naomi Elton, 75, every day to chat and talk about her piano prodigy son Curtis, 13.
Child genius Curtis, dubbed Mini Mozart, has appeared on Britain's Got Talent and performs all over the world.
Hayley carried on calling her mother every day because she didn't realise that her £37-a-month phone bill had skyrocketed to more than £400.
This carried on throughout October and November until Hayley was shocked to discover how much money was going out of her account.
She said: "I didn't know until about two months later.
"I couldn't understand what was going on. When I first contacted them they wouldn't apologise and wouldn't put anything in writing.
"After a while they apologised but they were very rude. EE say they care about people but they don't.
"I was a loyal customer and was with Orange before EE existed. I'm never going with them again, not after they treated me like that."
Hayley says after EE refused to return her money she complained to her bank and was able to get around £500 of the money back.
However she says she was still around £500 short and so contacted the communications ombudsman to complain in January.
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Unfortunately they made some errors in the investigation, something they later admitted in April.
In a letter to the mother-of-two, Ombudsman Services deputy chief executive Simon Morris said: "I am disappointed to see that our service has fallen short of our usual high standards in your case and I can appreciate how disappointed and frustrated you are."
Hayley finally decided to take her case to the small claims court.
Before the final hearing EE contacted Hayley and agreed to settle out of court. She received a cheque for £450 earlier this month.
Speaking at her hard-fought victory Hayley said: "EE want people to think that they care about their customers but they don't.
"They could have sorted this problem out straight away but they probably thought I wouldn't take it further.
"At times I thought about giving up but I didn't want them to win."
Hayley, who lives with her graphic designer husband Jonathan and daughter Sophia, 11, now has a contract with the 3 network.
An EE spokesman said: “We have apologised to Mrs Elton after she experienced a billing error and worked quickly to fix the issue and credit her account by nearly £1,000.
"We later reached a confidential settlement with her, and consider the matter now closed.”
Last month Vodafone was fined a record £4.6million for misleading 10,000 pay-as-you-go customers who were charged for top-ups but did not get the credits they paid for.
The German company also broke rules about how it handles complaints, regulators found.
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