The following blog entry has been republished here courtesy of Telecoms in Latvia.
My wife, son and I traveled to the US from Latvia via London, where we spent the night at hotel near Paddington Station. While packing to leave, my wife apparently left behind a Samsung Duo phone with a Swedish Telia SIM card in it (for certain reasons, she often keeps the phone with a Latvian and Swedish Sim card in it). Fortunately, she had moved the Latvian LMT card to another phone.
Upon arrival in Boston on December 28, she discovered that her other phone was missing. First, we thought it had been stolen from her baggage. She tried repeatedly to reach Telia through its single customer service number and was either cut off or put into a seemingly endless phone queue paying international roaming rates on her LMT phone.
Then, a day later, while driving in Massachusetts, she got a call on her Latvian phone (she had tried calling the Swedish number to figure out what had happened) from a person at the hotel where she stayed who said she had found the phone. My wife still wanted to lock down her SIM card, just to be sure. It was only on December 31 that she got through to Telia and had the card shut down.
The scary part about this is that this is exactly the kind of worst-case scenario where you want a very fast way to secure your phone and SIM card — the phone is lost in one country, the operator is in Sweden, and the phone owner is in yet another country. In this regard, Telia totally failed us, and my wife still doesn’t know what happened with her SIM card over the three days before it was locked down. There should be some kind of secure, fast-track process for shutting down a SIM card, preferably on the internet.
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It is one of modern life’s great ironies that practically all mobile phone companies seem to be incredibly difficult to contact using, er, a telephone.
I have had experiences with numerous companies along similar lines. They are great at setting up whizzy websites to get you to sign on the dotted line but seem surprisingly shy about using the very item they have sold to you and usually end up asking you to send a letter for anything even remotely important.