When my son was young, he came up with a game he called “Never Letting Go”, involving him furiously entwining his little limbs with mine and challenging me to try to escape.
I’m reminded of it every time I get an email from someone trying to extricate themselves from a contract, usually a cellphone contract. In other words, very often.
Ask for the cellphone company’s cancellations department and you’ll probably be referred to “Retentions” because never letting go is their favourite game, too.
So here’s the legal — Consumer Protection Act — position: if you want to cancel before your “fixed term” contract has run its full course, your service provider is entitled to impose a cancellation penalty — usually that’s a percentage of your remaining subscriptions.
If there are many months left in your contractual term, that penalty will be prohibitively high.
Once you get to the end of that “fixed term”, you can cancel without penalty, but — and this is the bit so many get wrong — you still have to give the company a month’s notice “in writing or other recorded manner and form”.
If you don’t, your contract will “roll over” to a month-to-month one and those debit orders will continue.
In other words, these contracts do not “die” on their own at the end of the term. You have to take proactive steps to kill them.
And even when you do, you may discover later that it was only you who thought it was over.
If you emailed your cancellation notice to your cellphone service provider, you may well be told later that you used the wrong address.
This cancellation game is not for sissies, and Gavin van Schoor knows this better than most.
He’d been a Vodacom customer since 1995.
His employer transferred him to the UK in June last year, and soon afterwards his SIM malfunctioned and Vodacom couldn’t supply him with a replacement.
So with just four months left on his contract, he decided to cancel and pay the relevant penalty.
“After more than 20 emails to Vodacom over a three-month period, my request was finally acknowledged at the end of October 2022, and confirmation sent that my contract was cancelled,” he said.
With that coinciding with the end of the contract’s fixed term, he assumed there would be no more debits, only to discover that Vodacom had continued to debit his bank account in November, December and January, plus another unexplained charge of about R100, bringing the total to R1,209.
“During this period, I got my bank to reverse the debit orders and sent numerous emails to Vodacom customer services but, as before, all were received and ignored.”
Finally, a friend armed with abundant tenacity and Van Schoor’s power of attorney managed to get the account closed, but he could not get that R1,209 “debt” reversed.
“I received no communication from Vodacom confirming the cancellation, although they have my email address on their records, and I have no access to my Vodacom account,” Van Schoor said.
But he did get a “threatening” email stating that he owed Vodacom R1,209 and that he would be handed over to debt collectors if he failed to pay, and the debt would feature on his credit record.
These contracts do not ‘die’ on their own at the end of the term. You have to take proactive steps to kill them.
When the debt collectors sent his mother in South Africa an SMS about Van Schoor’s alleged debt, he decided to pay up and be done with the issue.
“But the link on the message is to a firm of collectors and the only way I have to settle my ‘debt’ is to provide my bank login and password on what the firm claims to be a secure and encrypted site,” he told me.
He was not prepared to take that risk, and had little faith that his money would get to Vodacom.
“So now I sit with a debt against my name that is not valid, and no way to settle it — a lifetime of a spotless credit rating spoilt, thanks to Vodacom.
“Please can you help resolve this issue and clear my good name.”
I was happy to oblige.
“Upon investigation, it emerged that Mr Van Schoor sent a cancellation note to an email address that does not exist — Retentions.cancellations@vodacom.co.za,” Vodacom told me.
“Our correct cancellations email address is earlycancellations@vodacom.co.za.
“We have credited the outstanding amount of R1,207 and sent an instruction to the credit bureaus to update his profile.
“We have also withdrawn his file from the collections agency and updated and emailed his statement as proof of the closure of this account.”
“Utter nonsense” was Van Schoor’s response to the “wrong email address” story.
“I used multiple email addresses, all advised by Vodacom agents, including Retentions.cancellations@vodacom.co.za; earlycancellations@vodacom.co.za; customercare@vodacom.co.za; SpecificNeedsMail@vodacom.co.za; subscribercollections@vodacom.co.za and others I can’t recall.
“I received many automated reference numbers and authentication email responses but only two people gave me their names and actually emailed me back, one of them acknowledging that my cancellation was not actioned correctly.”
So I asked Vodacom if the company regularly checks call recordings to ensure that its agents are giving subscribers the correct addresses for cancellation notifications.
I haven’t had a response yet, but if they don’t, clearly they most certainly should.
Sadly, Van Schoor’s experience is by no means unusual.
In fact, I’m awaiting a response from MTN to a near-identical case.
It’s high time these companies aligned their procedures to the art of letting go with grace.
No, I’m not holding my breath either.
Instead, we consumers would do well to tackle contract cancellation notifications with abundant determination.
Remember the 30-day cancellation period; ask a call centre agent for the process required, print out your cancellation email as backup, and insist on confirmation of receipt.
If the company later claims it was never received, or you used the wrong address, demand access to the recording of your call with the agent.
And take to social and/or traditional media if all else fails.
In other words, play your own game of Never Giving Up.
• CONTACT WENDY: E-mail: consumer@knowler.co.za Twitter: @wendyknowler Facebook: wendyknowlerconsumer
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