Ofcom wants to hear about consumers who experience ‘bill shock’

The term bill shock is relatively new and has come about as a result of the rising number of people receiving unexpectedly high bills for services such as mobile phone and Internet – something that Ofcom is now keen to keep an eye on.

Over recent years more and more people have become familiar with the term ‘bill shock’ and this is as a result of the rising number of people that are being hit with huge and unexpected bills for services such as mobile phones and mobile broadband use. The UK’s communications regulator, Ofcom, has now stated that it wants to hear from consumers who have been at the receiving end of bill shock for services such as mobile phones, landlines, and internet usage.

The regulator wants to hear from people that have received an unexpectedly high bill over the past twelve months. According to research around six percent of consumers have received a mobile phone bill that has been unexpectedly high over the past year and five percent received an unexpectedly high landline bill. The average bill shock was said to be between thirty and fifty pounds for mobiles and between twenty and thirty pounds for landlines.

Many people who experience bill shock do so because they take their internet enabled devices abroad with them and then continue to use their internet devices as though they were still in the UK. However, the cost of data roaming is extremely high in many countries, which has seen consumers run up bills of thousands of pounds without even realising that they have done so.

Have you been one of the victims of bill shock?

Source – Guardian