A telephone company tried to charge a client in Murcia a monthly bill of almost 19,500 euros , which it finally canceled after complaints from a consumer organization, due to the automatic sending of more than 100,000 SMS messages in that period of time.

The situation was generated by a failure in the processes for sending these messages , which were sent automatically every second, so it was absolutely impossible for a person to perform this operation in those periods of time.

The client of this company, who did not want his identity to be published, has indicated that he opened the envelope with the invoice, corresponding to the consumption of August 2020, at his work station, initially thinking that the amount was little more of 19 euros, when the average consumption was 70 euros.

When he saw the bill he suffered dizziness
However, when he saw the diagram with the consumption bars for months, he was startled to see that the one corresponding to August was “very high” and he made sure that the amount rose to 19,484.60 euros , which made him dizzy and that his company colleagues were concerned about his state of health.

This man has pointed out that he was angry with this situation, especially when he had been litigating against a bank for ten years in the courts, winning his claim in the Supreme Court, where he filed an appeal after having lost in first and second instance.

The client has also explained that the charge came to him, but not to his usual bank account, where he did not have that balance , but to another that did have that amount, but whose numbering he had not authorized or provided to the telephone company (Vodafone).

For this reason, the man contacted the association La Defensa del Consumidor, of which his wife is a member, after his first two complaints were ignored by the operator, who cut his line and informed him of his intention to include him in the list of defaulters and initiate a lawsuit.

Finally, the mediation service of this association, after the “indecipherable web of rampages from one department to another” of the company, located a board under the pressure of the judicial complaint.

As a result of these efforts, the operator opened a line recovery file, which was already suspended for the association’s partner, while the resolution of the case was prolonged .

Finally, the conflict was resolved when the company assumed the error in the automatic sending of more than 100,000 SMS messages without the client having activated their sending.