Martin McDowell's Blog

A weird thing happened to my today. My pay-as-you-go phone that I recently had to transfer from MobileWorld to TalkMobile got barred (blocked) by the phone company.

I didn’t even realise anything was wrong until I tried using the phone this afternoon. Called TalkMobile and they told me that their fraud department reported fraudulent activity on my phone. What exactly that meant they either couldn’t tell or chose not to tell me. They did however instruct me to go to my nearest Carphone Warehouse shop to have the SIM card unlocked.

So I went and the very kind and understanding manager there had to wait on the phone for over half an hour to get it sorted. For reasons still very unclear to me the phone number was on a list of suspicious numbers. The number was quickly reactivated and I hope from now on it stays like that.

In my humble opinion I think there was just a cock-up at MobileWorld. First they had problems transferring the account to MobileWorld and then there was a problem with on-line topup. Despite me informing them of my current address they still had the old one on the system.

Good luck to anyone else this has happened to.

Update 6-Apr-2010

While I was travelling round Snowdonia and staying in Beddgelert where there is absolutely no Vodafone signal I thought that was the reason I wasn’t seeing the mobile operator “TalkMobile” displayed on the phone. It turns out they barred me AGAIN after 3 days after the first time. At least this time I had to call back the next day to sort it out and didn’t have to waste my time by having to trot my way to downtown Haverfordwest