Gotta tell you what I heard from agent orange

A while back I told you about changing over to Pay as you go on my Oranage mobile phone and told you how it was going to save money, well an update for that time, 3 months exactly, is that I've topped up by around £40 [with £8 still on my phone]. It means that I've been spending just over £10 per month instead of the previous £40 a month when I was on contract. In the whole scheme of things £30 a month isn't a lot but I am seeing the difference and feel much better now that there are less Direct Debits coming from my account.

On a related note, when I switched over I was about 2 days into a rental month but still got charged full whack. I thought this wasn't right and when I got my final bill through it looked like I was actually in credit and they'd reimbursed me £28.40 onto my orange contract. Obviously though I no longer had the monthly contract so couldn't access it! No where on the bill did it explain this and I ony realised that the sum was credit when I compared it to other bills.

I've been trying to ring them up for a while but have never been able to get path the labyrinthine telephone system they operate, which is like cracking code, deciding which button to press to go through to an actual human. I finally got through today, although I was peaved that I couldn't call Customer Services from my office phone as they'd only accept a call from my mobile, which cost me 25p! After a series of being put on hold [around 15 minutes in total] it's been sorted and will be going into my bank account in 7-10 days.

They said it should automatically go back into my account when I changed the contract but obviously it didn't, and it's got me wondering if this happens a lot, and there are people who just forget to claim this back. Sneaky Sneaky.

This reminds me of something that happened the other month, using betting site Mansion.com. They are the news sponsor of Tottenham Hotspur FC and so were running an offer on Spurs first game of the season. If you bet on Spurs to win, and they didn't, Mansion would refund your stake upto £100. Basically it was a no lose situation as you could either make £80 profit or just just your money back. Me anda group of friends all read the small print etc and signed up and placed our bets. To sign up all we had to do was put in your details, address, and card details, and then you could bet as much as you liked from your switch/credit card.

Now Spurs lost and it took around 3 days for the money to be debited back into our Mansion accounts. The nwe wanted to withdraw that back into our bank accounts, and this is where the snag was. As a security deterrent, and in order to withdraw cash you had to send them photographic ID and a copy of your card!! Can you believe it? So it was okay for me to use a bank card quite freely to put money onto my account, but as soon as I wanted to get it back they wanted to see ID!! Luckily I was able to scan my passport and email it to them, and after about 5 days I got my money back, but it still peaved me off.

I'm sure they did this to put people off withdrawing money from their gambling accounts, as if it had been a small amount of money I would've probably just gambled it away as I couldn't be bothered with the hassle. Also my money sat in their account making them interest whilst they dillydallied around, so it's in their best interest to slow the whole process down.

It annoyed me and I will not be using them again, but it is people being lazy that allows companies to act this way. There are loopholes for companies to use, such as with Orange not telling me I had money in my account, or Mansion making it hard for me to get my money back, but there are also loopholes for us to use, and so that is why I take up these free offers, hound them when they owe me, and constantly switch my credit cards over to interest free accounts, and try and find ways to save money. In my own way I'm sticking it to the man!