Eighteen months I had problems joining Vodafone but now I can't leave

Just over eighteen months ago, I was banging my head against a brick wall trying to join Vodafone, but now I'm feeling murderous over my attempts to leave them.

In November 2011 I rang Vodafone to discuss disconnecting my mobile as I was moving abroad, and they asked me to put my request in writing, which I did. I was advised that my contract was ending on 3 January, and I asked in my letter that the disconnection take place on this date. I sent the request by 'Recorded Mail', and it was signed for on 18 November by Vodafone.

On the 13th of February, after checking my bank statement, I noticed that Vodafone were still debiting money from my bank account; as my line rental was payable in advance and as I hadn't used the sim since prior to Christmas (expecting it to be disconnected on 3 January), I couldn't understand why there would be any need for Vodafone to debit money from my account. So I called Vodafone.

I spent eight and half minutes talking to Vanessa, who was very apologetic and confirmed that the disconnection request had been received, but she couldn't see why it hadn't been actioned. She confirmed it had been recorded onto my account in November, so they had plenty of notice. Vanessa advised that she would get it processed, and that a billing re-rate would be applied to my account, with the credit balance returned to my bank account.

I thought nothing of it, until checking my bank statement in April, and discovering that the money owed hadn't been returned to my bank account. By my reckoning, this was about £75, a not insignificant sum, and so I called Vodafone on 3 April.

This time I spoke to Heather, who claimed there was no record of my disconnection request, and no record of my phone call in February. I gave her the details several times, and eventually she told she couldn't handle my call and she would need to ask a manager to call me. I gave her my telephone number, but as yet, haven't had the promised telephone call.

At the same time, I also posted a message inside the Vodafone forum, asking for a resolution. I note that Andy from the eForum team edited the subject within 9 minutes, removing my customer account number. Over 24 hours later, I got a 'proper' response back, saying they would send me a PM to resolve this 'once and for all', but the PM didn't work. So I now was stuck chasing Vodafone by telephone and by web forum. When the PM finally worked, it was to ask me to tell them the same story again via a 'Contact Form', even though it was already detailed in my eforum posting. Swallowing my frustration, I did it again.

The response I got back was redirecting me to yet another contact form, which asked me to go through a 'security process'. This would be the same security process I had already gone through twice by telephone, with no result.

In the meantime on 4th April, I called Vodafone again, went through the security process again, and asked for the manager, who was too busy to speak with me, but James assured me that the manager would definitely, really call me back.

So I replied back to Vodafone's email, detailing my frustrations that all I seemed to do was go through security processes, and all Vodafone seemed to do was waste my time. I got back a standard script response asking - you guessed it - for it to go through the security process again.

So I called Vodafone again on 5th April (third time this week!), and again, no manager, no credit, no apology, but yes, the manager would 100% definitely call me back. Matt promised. Matt, your promises aren't worth the breath you used to utter it, because as yet, I've still not had a phone call from Vodafone. I have however had yet another Vodafone staff member email me, directing me to a contact form.

Now Vodafone, can I respectfully suggest that given I've been through the security process three times this week, and provided a contact telephone number three times for a mythical, imaginary manager to use to call me, that someone please do the following;

• cancel my mobile connection if not already done so
• re-rate the bill back to 3 January when the disconnection was requested for
• apologise
  

I'm beyond frustrated, and as of 9 April, the eight week deadline for complaint resolution has expired. So unless the matter is resolved to my satisfaction by 5pm on 11 April 2012, I will be doing the following;

• lodge a complaint with Ombudsman Services (Communications)
• lodge a claim with the County Court

Given that I've provided my contact telephone number to Vodafone Customer Services three times in less than seven days, I hope that Vodafone should be able to contact me without any difficulty.

My account number is 682343701.