TPG Mobile Barred Mobile Phone For Excessive Usage While Asleep Australia

On Friday the 7th February 2014 I received a text MSG from TPG saying 'Recent usage has exhausted your pre-payment, service barred, respond with UNBAR to initiate a $20 pre-payment'.

After logging onto my account I noticed I still had 500mb of 1gb left, I called TPG and they said if the remaining 500mb was not used I would be refunded the $20.

24 hours later I received another text MSG from TPG 'Your pre-payment outside value is low, we're charging you $20 to restore it.' Again, I went online to see what the issue was, seeing as I had just paid a 50% warning fee, and now I am paying again 24 hours later.

To my surprise, I saw the following.

08-02-2014 04:30:00 Data 454MB

So again, I called TPG and asked them how a person asleep that is connected to a TPG wifi could download 454MB at 4.30AM

With no answer to my question, all I got was 'We will look into it and call you back within 48 hours.

On the 13th February 2014, after still not receiving a call back, I received another text MSG from TPG 'Your pre-payment outside value is low, we're charging you $20 to restore it.' By now I was getting angry and called TPG again and wanted to get some answers and some data added to my account because I use my phone a daily basis and am always connected to the internet, again no real answers and no reason how the data was used, still under investigation.

On the 18th February 2014, again, another text MSG from TPG 'Your pre-payment outside value is low, we're charging you $20 to restore it'. Another hour on the phone and I finally told the guy I was going to write a review on this website and it was up to him it were a good review with great customer service or a bad review with TPG ripping people off, the response I received was gold 'It is up to you what you want to do, you can leave, you can write a bad review, it is your choice', which is when I asked the question, do you think the TPG owners would rather bad publicity which could cost them a tone of business or give a couple of hundred megabites of data to complete the month and a refund of $60. This time I was told my case will be escalated and a manager will call me back.

That now brings us to today 20th February 2014. A text MSG from TPG 'Mobile data BARRED due to excess usage'. 13 days since my first phone call and still NO ANSWERS and NO REFUND and now NO INTERNET until the end of the month! Unless I was to pay TPG another $50 to cover the last 10 days.

So it brings me back to the title of this post. TPG would rather take bad reviews on websites than help their customers. As an internet savy person myself, I know a little about reputation management and know that companies will pay thousands of dollars to remove bad reviews about themselves.

TPG being the big company they are, would probably drop $10k minimum to make sure no bad reviews of them appear on the first page of Google search, so 10k worth of PR which may or may not work or about $60 to keep customers happy and make sure they don't write bad reviews.

TPG Mobile, when it comes to customer service... you are the worst! I hope you read this post and see that losing nothing (MB's in my case) could save you more a lot more in the long run!

To finish off my rant, if you are looking for a reliable and affordable mobile phone company, stay away from TPG, they will get you with these hidden charges and bar your phone at no notice.