I have Vodaphone contract which is due for renewal soon and had a call from a chap who said he was from Vodaphone offering me an upgrade with a new phone with a good txt and mins package.

I asked if i could go to shop and discuss contract - 'oh no this is just an offer run by the billing department'

I asked them to send me something in writing - and surprise surprise have not received anything - that was three weeks ago.

I contacted the shop and asked if they could check to see if anyone from Vodaphone had called but no-one had.

They said unfortunately there are so many third party companies now selling phone contracts that they are lieing on the phone to get our business.

Sorry Crazycocker that you got caught out - pity Orange cannot do the decent thing and cancel one of the contracts.

did you sign any paperwork for a direct debit ?

We're paying the bills online each month so no DD set up and no, we didn't have any paper work, so no contract was signed.

They asked us to set up a DD and Paul said he would rather pay the bills as they came in, but by us not paying will put a black mark against us should we want to take out another mobile contract in the future. Trading Standards also said unfortunately we didn't have a leg to stand on, and that we should continue paying

The next bill you get from them send it back with 'not known at this address' on it lol!
Becky

Well we're still not paying either of the bills, had a couple of stroppy letters but we're not giving in. Next bill due tomorrow, we've not used the phone we've tried to cancel, upon their request, This morning, again we called Albasave, only to be told this time the computers were down and they would call back.....yeah right! No call of course. OH is going to ring them one last time tomorrow to tell them we are handing it over to Trading Standards.

We've had enough now!

This was featured on Granada TV the other night as being a massive nationwide scam. it seems an awful lot of people have been caught out...

If you have signed nothing, there is no contract that they can get you on. If they say it was a recorded conversation, tell them you want a copy [ which would prove their wrongdoing of course so they will either evade that or will say there was no recording ].
No recording as well as no signed contract = nothing they can prove against you

I would suggest you stop the payments immediately. They will soon be in touch [ as you can`t get them other than an answerphone ].
If / when they do make contact, just ask them for a copy of the contract with your signature on it, which they dont have of course, then invite them to take you court over it...

I had to deal with something similar that the thing I was married to took on, I said the above to them, and the matter was closed [ by them ] there and then

Don't worry we won't give in, for a start we can't afford to pay them £80 a month, orange are saying Alba Save are nothing to do with them and yet BOTH mobile numbers are registered against our online Orange account and when we pay, we make ONE PAYMENT to Orange.

What a pain in the ass! I hope you get it sorted, so infuriating

Ok, Update:

Up to today we still hadn't paid either of the bills, so it now stands at nearly £250, today orange blocked our phones, no problem as we hadn't been using them anyway.

Well OH got on the phone and spoke to a really nice lady called Jackie at Orange, she listened to our problems (unlike Albasave) went away to speak to her boss then called back.

They agree we were miss-sold this contract (never), not only that Albasave are supposed to ring Orange to find out how much longer we have left on our contract before offering us an upgrade, which they didn't do!

So in all fairness to Orange, they came back with a solution, for the 3 months bill outstanding, they have put the full credit back to our account, and for the remaining time left on the contract they will credit our account with £35 per month, to cover the original contract till it ends in October, we just have to ring them in September asking them to cancel our original contract.

So by holding on, we did get a result!