Giffgaff managed to find a way to overcharge prepaid subscribers

UK telecoms regulator Ofcom has fined MVNO Giffgaff £1.4 million for double-charging some of its pay-as-you-go customers.

Giffgaff specialises in prepaid SIM-only mobile phone deals, in which subscribers buy chunks of data, etc, marketed as ‘goodybags’, in advance and then buy more when those are used up. Any data used when a goodybag isn’t active is charged at 5p per MB. It looks like there was some delay in properly recognising when a fresh goodybag had been purchased from a billing perspective, resulting in people continuing to pay the metered rate at the same time.

This resulted in 2.6 million customers being overcharged by a total of £2.9 million, which might seem like a lot but is only a quid per punter. Once Giffgaff realised what it had done it grassed itself up to Ofcom, which proceeded to spend the next ten months ‘investigating’ what it had already been told. This resulted in Giffgaff being fined £1.4 million, which would have been more if Giffgaff hadn’t fessed up and already attempted to refund the overcharging.

“Getting bills right is a basic duty for every phone company,” pronounced Gaucho Rasmussen, Ofcom’s Director of Investigations and Enforcement. “But Giffgaff made unacceptable mistakes, leaving millions of customers out of pocket. This fine should serve as a warning to all communications providers: if they get bills wrong, we’ll step in to protect customers.”

Thanks Gaucho, but didn’t Giffgaff tell you what it had done and hasn’t it already taken remedial measures? What, exactly, have you done to further protect customers other than spend ten months mulling over how much to fine them? Even regulators can never resist an opportunity to self-promote.

Giffgaff seems to have missed a PR trick here too. There is nothing on its website or social media addressing this, so people are largely left to interpret the background to the fine themselves. For a prepaid brand that makes a virtue of transparency and value for money, this apparent shiftiness and surrendering of the narrative could end up being far more harmful than the fine itself.