iD Mobile Apologises for Wrongly Threatening Customers with Disconnection

Mobile provider iD Mobile has apologised to 24,000 customers after erroneously telling them their accounts were in the red and they risked disconnection.

The customers received emails last Monday stating incorrectly that there were outstanding balances on their accounts and saying that their mobile service would be “suspended until the full outstanding balance has been paid.”

Baffled recipients flooded iD Mobile and social media with questions and complaints, with many wondering why there were being threatened with disconnection when their payments were up to date. Traffic on iD Mobile’s app was so high that some customers were temporarily unable to access their accounts.

iD Mobile apologised for both the erroneous balance notifications and for the brief outages of its app and website.

The provider said in a statement that it had contacted through SMS all 24,000 customers who received the inaccurate emails to clarify and apologise. 

The unwarranted threats and outages are just the latest headache for iD Mobile’s 1.1 million customers, who have seen service from the MVNO deteriorate since the start of the pandemic. Complaints about iD Mobile have risen sharply, from just two per 100,000 subscribers in the second quarter of 2020 to six per 100,000 in the last quarter of 2020, the highest of any mobile provider, according to data collected by Ofcom. 

Service had improved moderately in 2021, with complaints down to five per 100,000 customers between January and March.

Owned by Dixons Carphone, iD Mobile resells service on Three’s network.

Lauren Smith

Lauren Smith has worked as a journalist and copywriter for most of the last decade, covering technology, energy, and consumer rights, in the US and UK.

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