Talk about tangled up ! Sorry, Voda. Your prepay contract terms don’t work.

A thread on Whirlpool about early termination fees under Vodafone mobile prepays led us into the maze of Voda’s complex contract terms.  And guess what ?  They don’t say what Voda thinks they say.

It’s a great lesson to telcos and their lawyers … Super-complex contracts don’t only confuse your customers.

The Whirlpool thread

Here’s the Whirlpool thread.

Basically, the question was about the lump sum Voda will bill you if you buy a prepay handset from their website and don’t activate within 30 days.  In some places, they call it an ‘Early Exit Fee’.

Understandably, one member of the thread assumed Voda could do it:

Since you are ordering this and having the phone sent to you, yes you’d need to activate the SIM card in the prepay pack in the 30 days. (Otherwise it’ll be followed by an invoice in the mail which they could/can legally make you pay).

But let’s look closer at Voda’s T&Cs.

They’re amazingly convoluted.  We can’t give you a URL because the terms are squirreled away in so many places.

But as far as we can follow this labyrinth, here’s what it says.  We’ll analyse the current Vodafone 226 Prepay Pack that the Whirlpool member was interested in.

A scroll box at foot of screen contains the terms & conditions.

We won’t bother you with the full guff.  All you need to know is that:

• ‘Early Exit Fees apply if not connected within 30 days of supply of handset on this Contract.’
• There is no mention of a minimum or fixed contract term, either in the T&Cs or anywhere else on the page.

No Plan Term

What’s the significance of ‘no minimum term’ ?  Well, if you take the time to seek out the definitions section in Voda’s SFoA, you learn that:  ‘Early Exit Fee means the payment or fee We will charge You, based on the Plan you are on at the time of disconnection, if, subject to the terms of this Agreement, You or We terminate Your contract with Us prior to expiration of Your Plan Term.’

So, an Early Exit Fee can only apply if customer terminates during a Plan Term.

What’s a Plan Term ?

According to the definitions, ‘Plan Term the term or commitment period of the relevant Plan as set out in Section 4 of this Agreement.’

Maybe Section 4 will tell us that a Plan Term applies for this prepay.

What we found at Section 4

Guess what ?  It doesn’t state a Plan Term for any prepay service.

The result ?

The so-called Early Exit Fee for failing to connect within 30 days cannot apply where there is no Plan Term.

Or, if this ‘Early Exit Fee’ means something different to the normal ‘Early Exit Fee’ referred to by the SFoA, there’s no basis in the documents (that we can see) for calculating it.  It’s an unspecified charge.

What would a court / the TIO do ?

Who knows ?  It’s a mess.  Maybe they’d do Voda a favour and recognise that a handset has value and stretch its terms to say that customer has to pay a fair amount.

More likely they’d just say that CSPs who pitch pages of complicated, layered T&Cs at customers deserve to get stung when their own legal team can’t keep it all together.

So we called Voda to check … and it got worse.

At 11:34 a.m. on 2 August 2008, we reached Voda’s sales team by phone, and were assured there were no Early Exit Fees applicable to the 226 offer.  ‘There aren’t any,’ they said.

We pointed out that the T&Cs at the foot of the page specifically said that Early Exit Fees could apply.  Voda rep’s best guess was that the T&Cs were ‘just a generic one’ i.e. didn’t actually apply to the prepay offer.  (Isn’t that comforting ?)

He was clear:  We could order and pay for the handset, and keep it and pay no more.  That would be our loss for not taking advantage of the prepay Maxi Cap offer, but we could do it if we wanted, with no Early Exit Fee.

He pointed out that the handset would be locked to Voda, and an unlock fee would apply to use it outside the network.

How bad is all this ?

The way Voda’s legals and web site are set up:

• An honest, god fearing Whirlpool member has concluded that a lump sum pay out charge applies, and is contractually enforceable.  Poor fellow assumed the contract terms on the page were sound.
• Legal analysis suggests that the terms don’t support such a charge.
• Voda rep says ‘Don’t worry about it.  Those aren’t the right T&Cs anyway.’

Our take on it

We intensely dislike overly complex documents, especially when terms and conditions are located in several different places.  Voda’s are a prime example of what we regard as worst practice.  No wonder everybody, from legal to web developer to sales rep to potential customer, thinks it all works differently.