Vodacom Misleading their clients with "Top up" contracts

[eshwar]

After some years I decided to take a contract with Vodacom again and I went for their latest cheap 2 Gig contract.

Because I cancelled my previous contract due to the ridiculous out of bundle rates about 4 years ago, I specifically asked for a top-up contract so that their system cannot keep on billing me once I am out of data

I just upgraded my pay as you go 3G to the contract.
I still had airtime money loaded on the number when they converted it to the contract

Last night I ran out of data and wanted to load more data using the available money on my account.
When i logged in, it was gone, R575 was not there.

So I contacted Vodacom and the first guy could not see what happened to the money and had it investigated. Then another guy called back and said it was used up because I used up my data at end May

So I asked him how the hell could I use it up if I have a "Top Up" contract. He said no, if there is airtime money on the account the system will use that money. So I told him it cannot be, that is exactly why I took a TOP UP contract to prevent Vodacom from stealing from me while I am not aware of it, like they did with the last contract.

He just said sorry, that is the way it works and if I dont want the system to use the airtime, I must convert it to data and not leave it as airtime on my account.

So is it only me that is dof or what does TOP UP means? To me it means, if the data is finished, the service will stop until you top it up with more of what it needs to work.

Am I wrong? If Vodacom's TOP UP means that if your data is finished it will just keep on taking your money like a normal open contract then in my opinion Vodacom is deliberating misleading their clients.

The gent who phoned offered to load me 500 Meg os data to make up for the loss and said I should take care in future, BUT I still feel that a TOP UP means that it must stop until I top it up so it can work again!

From your description, Vodacom is right on this one. Top Up adds money to your account rather than you being billed at end of month. Therefore, R 575 you had in your account was money you could use. And by default when bundles expire, it goes to OOB rates. You're lucky they even offered the 500MB bundle.

[beans100]

Pay as you go works exactly the same as TopUp.

In any case, Vodacom launched OOB=IB many years ago, on Contract, Top-Up and Prepaid. It's called Advanced and you can buy it like you can buy any other offer.

Ja, I know. The difference is: Now I get R315 on the 1st of every month. If I forget to convert some of it to data, I pay the out of bundle price and my R315 dissapears much faster. (Ja, I know they send the sms on 3MB, but like I said on previous post, sometimes you miss that sms)
On pre-paid, I only put on what I need and when I need it. Say I need 500MB data, I put on the money I need to buy the data and buy the data. Nothing extra for them to take if my data expires.

[albert123]

They do kick in when you have a converged billing system. The updates are done near real time, so prepaid and postpaid data is handled the same way. Cell C via Huawei has such a system since last year. Not sure why the others dont.

vodacon has a very simple reason for having the systems they do... they can easily rip off a few R100 bucks from each customer each month.... resulting in millions in their pocket through "above board fraud". why would they change it?