Mobile phone companies - don't trust them!

Who else is sick and tired of the way mobile telephone companies get away with their unscrupulous methods of extorting money out of you. Here are three practices that many of the mobile carriers conduct on a regular basis which the public are starting to realize.

1. Continuation of contract payments well after your contract period

They are all good at this. You pay 30 or 40 pounds (or dollars or whatever) a month for 24 or 36 months and when you complete the last payment they just keep on charging. Yes you have paid off that phone but they do not let you know. I have known people that have gone for years paying this extortionate amount to the mobile carriers well after the contract expiring. Imagine if you bought a car with a loan period of 2 years and the car company just kept on charging you the money after the loan had been completed.

1. Roaming ripoffs

How many of you have been caught on this one. You accidentally had your data roaming turned on and get hit for hundreds of dollars for just checking your email. This quite frankly is just bullshit that the carriers get away with. They will tell you that it is not them charging you this as it is the carrier in the foreign country that has billed them for it. WELL GUESS WHAT - they do exactly the reverse when someone from that foreign country accidentally roams in your country so don't tell me that they have nothing to do with this. How can any reputable organisation hit someone up for hundreds and in some cases thousands of dollars for a simple mistake that has no real cost to the carrier involved. Try telling me that this is ethical practice.

1. Special deals with hidden catches

Yes I love this one. You sign up to that deal that lets you use your minutes in a foreign country so you think all is great you can roam, talk and text while anywhere in the region they say. However they don't tell you the hidden little bits like if you call from your home country to any of these other destinations you will be hit with the full international rate which is often extortionate. There are probably many other little traps they get you for as well.

Now I am not here just to bash the mobile carriers but the problem is that when you are a customer for a business that relies on many millions of customers with small revenue generated from each customer then you as an individual do not matter and whatever you say to them will only get you the computer generated bullshit response. Furthermore you will only get this after fighting through 10 layers of automated responses on the soul destroying phone menus.

So my advice to anyone who signs any mobile contract going forward is to ask them every little detail that you can think about and stick the contract in your diary with numerous alarms and calendar entries reminding you of the dates that you are contracted with them. Treat the on the line terms and conditions that they force you to listen to as an absolute joke as they have already orchestrated many other ways in which they can dissect every last dollar out of you for the entire duration of your mobile phone contract.