Peter Cooper

A Fabulous Summary of Carphone Warehouse’s iPhone Debacle (And Possible Barclaycard Ones?)

Photo credit: James Cridland - CC 2.0 Attribution License

I’ve already posted about how I think Carphone Warehouse are a bunch of liars. Turns out it was no small blip on the radar, however. This post forms a summary of all the various problems I’ve found that people have had with The Carphone Warehouse regarding the iPhone 3G launch. In my eyes, their activities paint them as nefarious charlatans fueled only by avarice (or, kinder, a confederacy of dunces). At the end of this post I also consider whether CPW and Barclaycard have collectively had a problem regarding fraudulent transactions.

First off: Let’s call a spade a spade

First things first, let’s first establish that Carphone Warehouse made a cockup of their iPhone 3G launch. That much is fact given the number of complaints. Supposedly Carphone Warehouse even ruined one guy’s credit rating due to their incompetence:

[B]ecause I was honest and took a phone that had been given to me with NO attempt to verify my identity, acquire my signature, or anything else - making it totally untraceable - back to the store beacause I just wanted it to work, I’ve now come home with NO IPHONE and a RUINED CREDIT RATING.

A one off, right? No. Let’s walk through some quotes.

A Fabulous Summary In Quotations of Supposed Carphone Warehouse Incompetence:

First, Twitter users:

Stuart Ridout says “My iPhone purchase from Carphone Warehouse has been the most stressful of my life … no info, no help and no iPhone! Liars and muppets!”

Andrew Ebling says “Appalled someone@Carphone Warehouse leaked my debit card details to an imposter.”

Alberto Nardelli says “carphone warehouse are absolutely dreadful. They border line delinquency.”

Cybersoc says “unbelievable! The carphone warehouse just took away my iphone! They actually took it away. Total incompetence! Blog post soon!”

Simon Pow says “About to head to Carphone Warehouse & demand a refund for my non existsnt iPhone.”

Phil Gyford says “Struggling to find adequate descriptions of Carphone Warehouse. Descriptions that go further than ‘blatant liars’.”

Rob Wright says “One week on from ordering my iPhone from the Carphone Warehouse. Still i haven’t received it.”

Ed Farrow says “It appears that Carphone Warehouse have scammed me and taken money out of my account despite advanced requests to cancel the order.”

Sam Oliver says “iPhone out of stock everywhere, Carphone warehouse completely screwed up my order and have repeatedly given me wrong information.Don’t use!”

Simon Thomas says “So Carphone Warehouse have LOST my iPhone. Customer service says its in the branch, branch says its not, even though they signed for it.”

martymc says “I have a iPhone but dont have an iPhone thanks to the crap systems at carphone warehouse. ”

It doesn’t end with Twitter. The Web is groaning with complaints..

About 30 similarly pissed off customers have written in to phonesreview.co.uk.

One chap on the MacRumors forum shitstorm is “sick with anger and disappointment.” Further:

[CPW] told me I would never get the phone, because they had over-committed their allocation and had accepted more orders for 16GB than they ever had, and he didn’t reckon they would have any more 16GB in for several weeks. So basically, despite being one of the first to order and all CPW’s assurances, I’m never going to get my 16GB, I’m afraid after looking forward to today so much like a kid, I just can’t bring myself to wait another 2, 3 or even more weeks in the hope of new stock.

And, “This should have been a great day, instead CPW have totally ruined it for me.”

Tom Smith talks of a “Carphone Warehouse iPhone Scam” and then moves on to call them scum instead. Like me, Tom has pretty much lost interest in the iPhone.

James Whatley thinks the Carphone Warehouse needs to get an evangelist to deal with the flood of complaints.

Dan Lane, who was invited to a CPW store by CPW’s PR department, encountered all sorts of issues with them.

Paul Walsh says “Carephone [sic] should consider hiring new management…”

While Rome burns, have CPW been fiddling, by adding bolt-ons to contracts they shouldn’t have been?

Suw Charman is pissed off that existing iPhone users weren’t given the option to pre-order for upgrades.

Yet more people pissed off at CPW promising delivery dates then not fulfilling them. One user shares my concerns:

This is causing such a PR backlash for apple, I’ve spent over £4000 with them this year, getting a new macbook air, and a macpro, and even though I know it’s not apples fault, it certainly burns my customer perception that I’ve gone through so much hassle in regards to an apple product.

“mickeymongoose” says:

Sorry for the rant, but the gist of what I’m saying is that CPW are rubbish, and not just incompetent, but purposefully so. I imagine somewhere they have a spreadsheet with the expected number of people they think will give up and cancel their orders and the loss in revenue due to that is smaller than the gain from allowing an overabundance of orders and just keeping people in the dark until they can be completed.

Ali A reports a similar story to my own (see user comments):

I ordered my iphone online with carphonewarehouse monday of last week, and received confirmation email early last week to say phone to be delivered last friday. I worked from home friday to wait for the phone, at 4pm I finally managed to get through to carphonewarehouse sales, they said they couldnt do the security check on their system, fault at their end, they could not accept another payment method or card and so transaction was cancelled. I rang today to follow up and the sales support hung up on me. I am appalled at the poor level of service from carphonewarehouse - discusted actually. I will cut my left hand off before buying anything from them again. They had obvisouly sold me iphone and were making one excuse after another not to tell me that. awful - never buy from carphonewarehouse!

On the same page, a user called Wardy comments:

I ordered my iphone on monday this week and when i went to collect it yesterday they had sold it to someone else, Not happy at carphone warehouse.

All this, despite the claim on their own Web site:

At the Carphone Warehouse, we believe in being totally honest with our customers. That means that when you see an item with the “In stock” badge against it, we guarantee that this item is in stock.

Yet another thread full of complaints regarding lies over stock levels. Charles Dunstone should be absolutely ashamed of the culture that has developed within his company.

Got more complaints? Post the link in the comments here, and I will continue to extend this post.

My Own Story

Within a few hours of the pre-order process going live, I put in an order with Carphone Warehouse for an iPhone 3G. I chose to have it delivered to my local store as I wouldn’t be at home on release day. On Thursday I got a mail, containing my order number, saying my iPhone 3G would be delivered “by July 11th” (Friday).

I went to my local Carphone Warehouse on Saturday and while they admitted one had been delivered on the Friday, they said it had “already gone” and didn’t know when mine would turn up (without even asking my name - hmm..). They said they were getting more on Monday. I went in on Monday; same deal. They’d had some in, but they’d sold them. I called Carphone Warehouse to investigate cancelling my order and they said I had to check if they’d take any money before they could do anything. Before I could do this (thanks to Barclaycard restricting my account for no reason at all), they sent me an SMS at 4am the next morning saying my order was cancelled.

BarclayCard have still locked my card up, refuse to tell me why, and despite promising to send a new one, I still have no working card. Only a call to close my account today has forced them to admit they had a ‘processing error’ and will send a new one ASAP.

Carphone Warehouse, O2, and Apple have all made a grave error in not accepting any responsibility for these debacles. Even if Apple had publicly come clean and apologized for the balls up in rollout, a lot of people would be able to swallow it. The silence, however, kills confidence in a company we’re meant to trust to run a monopolistic, DRM-laden, walled-garden mobile platform! I’m not getting an iPhone in the near future. If Apple doesn’t think the buck stops with them, they’re wrong. I’ve spent almost £10,000 with them in the last 18 months and they have totally sold all the brand value they had with me down the river. Fuck Apple. (By the way, if anyone wants an almost new 8-core Mac Pro with 30″ Cinema Display, I want to sell mine and get a PC.)

Barclays / BarclayCard and Carphone Warehouse Potential Fraud?

I’m investigating a potential connection between Carphone Warehouse transactions (primarily for the iPhone 3G) and BarclayCard (and Barclays debit card) fraud / rejected transaction reports. This post is to act as a repository for the information I find, and the comments to act as a place for you to share your own info or get in touch with me. There’s either a coincidence going on here or a conspiracy; I intend to establish which. Please leave comments with any supporting information.

A post on the O2 customer forum with people reporting issues with Barclays debit cards being processed at CPW stores. One person talks about two different Barclays cards being rejected (from different people) at the same store, another talks about Barclays blocking CPW transactions due to fraud (I have this page archived in PDF in case it disappears). In another post, someone reports issues with Barclays and CPW, though someone else has had success.

One forum user says about his own transaction woes: “Turns out Barclaycard Fraud Prevention blocked the transaction, as they ’seem to get a lot of fraudulent transactions from Carphone Warehouse.’” Note that this is an alleged quote from a Barclaycard phone operator. Carphone Warehouse supposedly making fraudulent transactions? Never!

This is probably not related but, allegedly, Apple has randomly been taking £121 from various people’s accounts without permission. It seems some people might be confused between authorization and actual debit though, but maybe not..

(By the way, if anyone wants an almost new 8-core Mac Pro with 30″ Cinema Display, I want to sell mine and get a PC.)

I get you a shiny 5p piece that you don’t sell it.

That’s the best offer I’ve had, I’ll admit. Selling computers is like pulling teeth.

Damn, that sucks. It seems that I’m one of the few that had a completely stress and problem free iPhone 3G purchasing experience. Probably mostly because it didn’t involve CPW

[...] who, as you know, doesn’t fall for the whole hype thing, ahem, I’ve managed to join the extremely popular “People who have an iPhone (but don’t and might not ever have one) [...]

Carphone Warehouse also own TalkTalk, whose customer relations are so bad as to have a dedicated blog:

http://talktalkhell.wordpress.com/

Bad guys.

I’m the martymc from the twitter comments above. I now have the iPhone hardware, it’s still not connected to the network though. Carphone Warehouse are completely incompetent.

Just back from my hols in Spain and still no sign of my replacement iphone! I’ve been told that all Carphone Warehouse stores will receive stock of iphones tomorrow (24th), so hopefully I should get my replacement then.

What really annoys me is that they (Carphone Warehouse) have been charging me line rental from the day I received the faulty item (14th) even though I’ve not been supplied with a phone to make any calls/texts from. I’ve called the store several times today asking for this to be rectified and an update, but unfortunately they didn’t didn’t decide to answer their phone that day and I had to call the head office instead. Strangely, the head office tried getting in contact with the store but they couldn’t seem to get through either! In the end, they told me that all stores should receive stock so I should try calling the store again tomorrow. Huh? Ok, I’ve already paid £59.99 for the phone, £45 line rental, and most probably £10 worth of call charges to them from my landline phone, and still I’ve not received anything in return, don’t I get at least an apology or somekind of refund on my line rental!!?

Furthermore, I sold my previous phone, the Nokia N95, and terminated my t-mobile contract so I won’t have two phone contacts running in tandem but all has happened is that I’ve now been left with no phone altogether! - Which doesn’t really help given that I’m a high phone user and also needed my phone while I was abroad.

I can’t help feeling that Carphone Warehouse was the wrong route to go down to get an iphone. I think the 02 store would give me less trouble.

CPW were a nightmare of epic proportions to deal with. They took £99 out of my bank account even though the order was cancelled in advance and had messages all over it saying ” DO NOT PROCESS ” (at least, according to CPW themselves.)

Despite taking £99 out of my account without my consent for an order that was cancelled, they refused to refund it back to my account stating that I would have to receive it in a cheque form instead.

2+2=5, I came to the conclusion that they are doing this to a) make a little profit from the interest, if they have done this to other people, and b) make their July profits / sales of iPhone look good.

I have now received a cheque through the post for a sum of £99. Great, that’s being processed, 5 days, et cetera.

It did however come with a letter, thanking me for my purchase and stating that the £99 was “as part of your purchase.” So it looks like option b may well be a reality.

[...] A Fabulous Summary of Carphone Warehouse’s iPhone Debacle (And Possible Barclaycard Ones?)Oooph. And illustrated, naturally, with my iPhone image. [...]