Dear LPG,

I want to complain about the amount of ‘red tape’ that is connected to sorting anything out on line these days, and which also can complicate the issue if you give your email address when buying anything.

My son bought my first mobile phone for me years ago.  It was a Christmas present and worked beautifully all the time I had it, but I recently decided that it was so old that I needed a newer model.  When he bought it he opted for a pay-as-you-go arrangement with the service provider, but knowing what I know about them now, I decided to get a much more sophisticated model and the one I finally decided on was a smart phone with the Internet, and a really nice camera.  When I thought about the value of the thing, I decided to have a contract because that included insurance and meant that if the software (programmes that make the phone work) went down or it broke in any other way I could get it replaced the next day for a relatively smaller outlay then the more than £350 it would cost to buy again outright. 

Having made all these arrangements I found that I could not change to the type of contract I wanted for my new phone without my son’s permission. His name was one stumbling block but they also asked me some really odd questions about my past before getting to the question of the password on the account, which I was unable to answer correctly.  The whole process then became a lot more problematic because since that Christmas my child’s circumstances have changed.  He now lives in the USA and, after quite a bit of to-ing and fro-ing, I finally got in touch with him so that he could make a call from there to the UK mobile phone people in order to get the situation fixed, and after the years that had gone by he had quite a job remembering what he had told them when he first bought the thing.   The result was that it took us weeks to sort out the problem.

Why was there so much red tape involved?

UT, Ladywell

The simple answer is Security.  Back in the days when shopping meant walking down to the high street we regularly went to our local shop where the shop assistant knew us and we knew them to a degree.  The fact, to a large extent, is that our face was our password or PIN number back then.

Now it is possible to do your banking, open an account with a supermarket or an email service provider, pay your bills and buy all manner of things on line (even a new car) without even seeing the person who sold it to you (if it was a person and the transaction was not automatically processed by a computer).  It is also more than probable that, even if you do go to a shop (say the local mobile phone shop) to buy something these days, you are a lot less likely to visit the shop again if it goes wrong. 

The people we buy from have a responsibility to make sure that they are following your instructions and without being able to see your face or see you sign your name, they have to have some other way of making sure that you are really you. 

So they ask two or three of the odd and personal questions that we have become used to answering about the name of our first school teacher, our mother’s maiden name or the make and colour of the first car we owned because they are questions with answers that are so diverse that very few people other than you will get them all right. 

After all, if someone else phoned the mobile company and instructed them to cut your phone off we think you would be quite upset.

So the moral of the story is that whenever you are buy something, register online for something or join something, and you are asked for all those weird details, make a note of the answers that you give (hopefully you will remember the colour of your first car but remembering a password that you gave ages before your purchase went wrong is a lot more difficult) and if someone gives you a mobile phone check that they took the contract out in your name using your details, or at least that you know all the security information that they gave on your behalf just in case.   

As we tried to explain in our news article dated November 15^th 2017 that was entitled ‘Yet another number to remember…’, when it comes to buying a mobile phone it is important to know that the actual mobile phone and its number (the one that your friends dial to get through to you) are different entities and you will need to check both sets of details if you need to claim on your contracts insurance. 

LPG will point out that this is a very simple explanation to a very complicated question but we hope it helps. 

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