I have had an interesting and frustrating several hours today trying to sort out my account with Orange.

At lunchtime today, whilst travelling between meetings I received an sms from Orange stating that my order had been despatched and was due for delivery tomorrow. As I hadn’t actually ordered anything I was somewhat perplexed and made a note of the details so I could find out what was going on after I had finished being bored stiff attending some particularly pointless gatherings.

On phoning Orange and working my way through several overly familiar account monkeys I finally got through to someone who sounded at least alive and relayed the details of the sms and asked what exactly was going on.

To say I was somewhat surprised when I finally found out what had been going on is something of an understatement!

Apparently, someone had phoned Orange this morning pretending to be me and had persuaded Orange to not only change my account address to one in London before ordering a new phone and call package on my account for delivery to this new address.

I asked, somewhat incredulously, whether they usually allow this sort of suspicious change just by word of mouth and received the reply – you are a long standing customer and we always try and accommodate requests from our loyal customers.

Needless to say that I don’t think I will be a customer of theirs much longer if they allow this sort of fraudulent activity to occur with a simple phone call especially after I was given the third degree in questioning before they would revert my account address back to my actual home address. I am pretty sure I was asked for more security information that this mornings mystery caller and that in itself increased my level of pissed off no end.

Tomorrow I should have the pleasure of speaking with the fraud department which I am sure will be a delight especially if they start by addressing me by an abbreviation of my first name as the first customer service person did today. He got a flea in his ear before he had even finished his sentence.

To be continued …