Hello all, After I check out the CIS summary below and all seemed OK. I picked up an 40GB $40 prepaid sim starter pack while on sale at Coles for $15 to use while waiting for my NBN connection.
Following your initial payment on sign-up, you’ll be billed for subsequent monthly charges in advance on the same day each month. We’ll notify you of your payment day after you sign-up, and you can see it at any time in our app or by signing in to your account on our website.
So I continued signing up and It requires a credit card for monthly payments, (no worries as I’ll be connected in less that a month and 40GB will be plenty especially for $15) and then I’ll cancel it before the 30 days.
To my surprise I’m billed $40 two days later and my data is now 80GB. I signed up on the 10th and apparently my payment day is the 12th.
I find this very misleading? One would assume from the CIS it would be the same day?
I, and other members of my family, have been using Belong for a couple of years now - with no problems - but - we signed up online, & received our SIM cards in the mail, then activated them according to Belong’s instructions.
It would appear that the glitch is tied up with the Coles purchase - Belong’s site is very basic/no frills, but the couple of times I have needed support, the service was good (although tricky to navigate the first time…).There is no contact phone number, any support is done online. Log in to your account, open Support on the bar; go to ‘Fix a problem’, then select ‘Other support’ from the menu. There will be some FAQ’s /answers to look at (but they probably won’t deal with your issue!), so select the last option of ‘How do I get in touch etc’, then create a Support Request, explaining your issue.
I suggest you screenshot/copy/save all “correspondence” in case you need to use an Ombudsman. Hope this helps.
I wonder if this means that you will always be billed one month in advance, namely, when one activates a SIM, immediately on activation one month in advance will also be billed…rather than the recharge occurring one month from the date of the initial activation.
The CIS also states
If you cancel your service, we won’t refund any fees that you’ve already paid to us and your service will stop working within an hour of your request being actioned.
In effect this means if the one month is in advance as outlined above, on cancelling the service one loses the one one advance already paid. This means for short term customers like yourself, it becomes an expensive proposition (paying in effect 2 months for one month of service).
I would be contacting Belong to see if what has happened is correct as it does seem a little odd. If there was a problem, maybe also see if you can get the $40 credited back onto your credit card.
I’ve contacted Belong and I’m awaiting their reply.
In the meantime I was just going to cancel my payment authorization but this also looks like it will prove difficult (see below). As my daughters mobile is payed for from the same credit card. So it looks like if I cancel one I lose the other? This is proving very frustrating.
Your details are the same across all of your Belong services. Changes made here will also be applied to your other services.
I’ve receive a reply back just now. I can hardly believe it. A gift!!! that I payed for?
Thank you for reaaching Belong Mobile.
We’re really sorry about the confusion on your side. No worries, we’re here to help you with your concern.
We can see that you have successfully acctivated your SIM last 9/01/2020. With this, your billing cycle falls every 12th of each month. Your service from the activation date 9/01/2020 until your first billing cycle 12/01/2020 will be free as welcome gift.
The first 40GB of data that you have received last 9/01/2020 is just a welcome gift, and the 40GB of data that you have received yesterday 12/01/2020 is for your first payment(first month with Belong). Your next billing date will be on 12/02/2020.
Just in case you’ll need some help about your payments, you can just simply access your online account and check your invoices. Please click this link: https://www.belong.com.au/account
We will now mark this support ticket as a resolved case.
Nothing mentioned about a “gift”, although the fine print says loaded credit will expire in 12 months, but according to the website if I cancel my payments all credit is lost?
If you look at the packaging you posted, the last sentence tells you that is what happens. You must have an active account, and if you cancel payments, you don’t.
I see that the gifting they are promoting seems to be Data Gifting whereby you can gift unused data to someone else. They also discuss Data Banking or basically data rollover, so if you don’t use the allocated data in a month the remaining data rolls over into the next month.
The 12 months expiry on credit I understand to mean you can buy that package now but not activate it for 11 months and if you do activate before the 12 months after purchase the $40 credit will be applied.
