O2 sues customers as unpaid mobile phone bills spiral

MOBILE phone company O2 has launched a crackdown on debtors, last week taking 70 people to court to recover €100,000 in unpaid phone bills.

Of the 126 men, women and businesses named as debtors in the current Stubbs Gazette, more than half owe money to O2, Ireland’s second-largest mobile phone firm.

The country’s biggest unpaid bill rung up by an individual was for €3,874 and belonged to a man in Togher, Cork. O2 last week secured a judgment against him at the district court.

By securing judgment against the man and the 69 other debtors, O2 can now take greater steps to recover the debts and also warn future lenders about the unpaid bills.

“Customers have lots of options to pay before we take them to court,” said O2 spokeswoman Fiona Dowling yesterday.

Of Ireland’s five mobile phone firms, only O2 appears in the current weekly issue of Stubbs as taking action against debtors.

By contrast, landline firm Eircom has taken just one case in the past week, which was for a sum of €756 owed by a woman in Dún Laoghaire, Co Dublin.

The gazette — used as a reference guide by lenders — lists 70 debtors who owe O2 Communications (Ireland) Ltd €100,123, an average of €1,430 each.

At 25c per minute calling charge, the 70 indebted callers racked up 400,492 minutes of call time without paying — equal to 6,675 hours, or 278 days, or almost 40 weeks non-stop.

Most of the debtors are individuals, while the remainder are businesses. The highest unpaid bill from a firm was €4,309, owed by an enterprise in Castletownroche, Co Cork.

Almost every county had an O2 debtor, the worst offenders being in Cork, with 12 customers owing €20,014, or €1,668 each on average.

By contrast Dublin city and county had just six O2 debtors owing a total of €7,219, or €1,203 each on average. In Co Mayo just one person was in debt to O2, owing €965.

The lowest debt was for €547 rung up by a man in Co Louth, while the woman with the highest bill was from Killarney. She talked her way through €3,587 of calls before O2 took action.

Yesterday debt counsellors urged O2 customers and subscribers to other networks to act if they found they were having trouble paying their bills.

“People let things build up and then ignore the bills because they cannot cope with the issue, but that’s not the thing to do,” said Stuart Kenny, of the Society of the St Vincent de Paul charity.

“If things are getting out of hand then act quickly and talk to the society or to the Money Advice and Budgeting Service (MABS).”

* Contact MABS on www.mabs.ie or 1890 283 438.