You might think it’s impossible to mistake Paris, France, for the less grandiose Paris in Texas, or Amsterdam in the Netherlands for the one in New Jersey, but not for EE, apparently, which suffered map trouble when it billed tens of thousands of customers who were travelling to Europe as if they had been in the United States.
Yesterday the mobile telecoms company was hit with a £2.7 million fine and forced to offer a grovelling apology to the 32,000 customers affected, as well as hading over full refunds, after admitting to the error, which occurred between July 1, 2014, and July 20 last year.
Although the 32,145 customers affected were out of pocket by an average of only £9.42, the severity of the fine reflects the seriousness with which Ofcom regards overcharging.
The regulator criticised EE’s “carelessness or negligence” and chided the company for initially saying it could not identify all of the people it had overcharged because it no longer held the records.
“EE didn’t take enough care to ensure that its customers were billed accurately,” Lindsey Fussell, Ofcom’s consumer group director, said. “This ended up costing customers thousands of pounds, which is completely unacceptable.”
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EE, which was bought by BT last year for £12.5 billion, said in a statement that it had put measures in place to prevent a repeat. “For those customers that we could not identify, we donated the remaining excess fees to charitable causes, in line with Ofcom’s guidelines,” it said, adding it was trying to trace 6,905 affected customers who had since left the network.
The error occurred after EE instructed its third-party data-clearing house to remove the “44” UK international dialling code from the records of calls made to certain short code numbers. This meant that EE’s billing system mistakenly interpreted the leading “1” digit as the international dialling code for the United States and charged customers £1.20 per minute, instead of 19p.
EE then continued to bill 7,674 customers until January last year after making it free to call or text the “150” number from within the European Union from November 2015.