Telecoms provider EE has been issued with a £2.7 million fine after Ofcom found that it had been overcharging customers.
Ofcom, an independent telecoms industry regulator, had been investigating EE since January last year, and noted in September that it considered there to be “reasonable grounds for believing” that the company had been overcharging its customers for its services.
It was determined on Tuesday that EE had “broke a fundamental billing rule on two occasions” over the course of 2014 to 2016, having overcharged an estimated 40,000 customers by as much as £250,000. This follows similar fines issued to its competitor Vodafone (LON:VOD), which in October was issued the largest fine in the regulators history. Vodafone was dealt the £4.6 million penalty after Ofcom found that the mobile fine provider had been culpable of “serious breaches of consumer rules”.
Lindsey Fussell, Ofcom’s consumer group director, said in comments to the BBC: “We all rely on big companies to get the most basic things right, and that includes charging the right bills… we uncovered a catalogue of errors.”
EE have reassured customers that efforts have been made to refund around 6,905 customers who had been overcharged by at least £60,000 in total. In light of the allegations, the company have also donated £62,000 to charity and it has emphasised that it intends to continue to locate and refund those customers that had been misdealt with.
In response to the Ofcom decision, an EE spokesperson issued the following statement:
“We accept these findings and apologise unreservedly to those customers affected by these technical billing issues between 2014 and 2015.
“We have put measures in place to prevent this from happening again, and have contacted the majority of customers to apologise and provide a full refund.
“For those customers that we could not identify, we donated the remaining excess fees to charitable causes in line with Ofcom’s guidelines.
EE is owned by BT (LON:BT.A), which acquired the mobile operator following a £12.5 billion deal last year. Shares in the company were down by 0.55 percent as of 10.05 AM (GMT) in early morning trading.