PRESS RELEASE: Monthly Monitoring Report No. 5/2019

Prague, 22 May 2019 – Disregard of the termination by a subscriber may lead to sentence for aggressive commercial practice. This is the case of the operator Vodafone, that demanded from its previous customer a payment for services provided after a termination of an agreement. CTU imposed a fine of 25,000 CZK on the operator. The decision is final.

In this case, the consumer duly delivered a termination of an agreement to Vodafone store on 5 December 2017. The contractual relationship subsequently terminated when the period of notice expired on 6 January of the following year. However, Vodafone stated that the termination had been delivered for processing with a delay, that is on 10 January. Therefore, the customer was charged for continuous use of service. Despite the compensation rendered by the operator for all unjustified charges on the basis of complaint, all signs of forbidden aggressive commercial practice were accomplished. As an aggravated circumstance was stated by CTU Vodafone’s recidivism, since it was not the first time the operator used unlawful practices in relation to a termination of contract by a consumer.

Furthermore, the monitoring report informs on how to proceed in case of outage of provided electronic communications service. Subscribers can claim a removal of the defect and a proportionate price reduction. This claim should be included in a filed complaint.

An attachment to the monitoring report analyses complaints and inquiries with which CTU dealt in the first quarter of this year. The statistics show an increasing tendency in complaints in regards of subscriptions. The second most frequent issue is disagreement with pay statement. The amount of issues in the postal sector is also growing. In comparison with previous year, the largest number of complaints on delivery of postal items was received in the last quarter.

The monitoring report is available here.

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