We checked our bank statement recently (the Royal “we”), and discovered that two payments had been made to Telefonica in one month! Our own bill is quite low, but the second one was considerably more. We telephoned Telefonica only to be “fobbed off”, they would get back to us! Yeah, right – of course they didn´t.

We eventually found out that the bill was for a flat we had lived in previously, we moved here after leaving the apartment and actually took out a new contract at this address. The phone line at the old address being discontinued.

Several months hence – they reinstated the line in a different name and charged the bills to one of our bank accounts. Eventually, we managed to find someone at our bank who took an interest and has promised to refund the payment. They intend checking on the details given to the company and no doubt if this person passed on our bank details to Telefonica, legal action could be taken against the customer. Is it fraud? Time will tell whether anything will be done about it.

We actually phoned the number, the woman who answered was startled when confronted with someone asking why payment for their phone bill had been taken from our account. She said the phone was in the name of her mother in law and she would contact them the following day.

Allegedly, they supplied our bank details to pay the phone bill which is in their name.

The moral of this story is – if you rent accommodation long term and have a telephone line installed, when you leave you just might end up in the same position, i.e. paying another person´s bills! Fraud seems so much easier now than the days when you had to go into the bank to authorise payments.