Woman is left £27,000 in debt after her new Orange pay as you go mobile withdraws £20 from her bank account every TEN MINUTES

• The technical glitch meant Anne Roberts paid out £120 an hour for almost a WEEK

A holidaymaker was left £27,000 in debt after mobile phone company Orange extracted £120 an hour from her account for almost a week.
Anne Roberts was horrified to discover NatWest had repeatedly allowed the funds to be taken after she purchased a £20 pay-as-you-go phone while holidaying in Wales.
A technical blip meant Orange had been withdrawing £20.49p from Ms Roberts’ account every ten minutes since she bought it.

Nasty surprise: Anne Roberts was horrified to discover Orange had extracted £27,000 from her bank account after she purchased a £20 pay-as-you-go phone while holidaying in Wales

Mrs Roberts had decided to buy the cheap phone with a £20 top up card from the Orange store in Carmarthen because her own mobile phone had no signal in Cwmdu near Llandudno.
But less than a week later she was shocked to find her bank account was more than £27,000 overdrawn.
Mrs Robers, from Ashburton, Devon, said: 'I had a text message on my phone from the bank saying I had to pay funds in.
'I went and put my card into the machine and found that I was £27,210.72p in debt.'

 

She immediately went to a nearby NatWest bank branch where staff stayed until after closing time in order to resolve the problem.
Mrs Roberts said after sifting through 500 pages of bank statements, bank staff discovered that Orange had been withdrawing money every ten minutes.
She then spent two days of her holiday trying to resolve the mess.

Glitch: Mrs Roberts said after sifting through 500 pages of statements, bank staff discovered that Orange had been withdrawing money every ten minutes

Mrs Roberts went back to the Orange shop and was told the entire bank statement needed to be faxed to the company.
She said: 'I couldn’t take it all in, so they allowed me to take a tenth of the statement in.'
She had also been credited by the company 792 times but had to cut short her break because of phone calls from collection agencies.
Orange apologised and said the money had been refunded.
A spokesman said: 'We have identified a technical issue resulted in multiple card payments being taken from her account for the purchase she made in our Carmarthen store.
'We have begun a high priority investigation to determine the cause and have been working closely with Mrs Roberts to ensure all payments taken in error are refunded in full.
'We understand this situation has been upsetting for Mrs Roberts and we apologise unreservedly for the inconvenience it has caused.'
Mrs Roberts claimed other customers had suffered the same problem, with one person being overdrawn by £39,000.