Widow harassed by Telstra over husband’s phone account

ABC NEWS (Australia)

There are calls to close a gap in consumer protections for phone and internet customers to prevent grieving families being unnecessarily harassed by their provider after the death of a loved one. It follows an investigation by the industry regulator, which found Telstra had caused considerable anguish for bereaved families including one widow who was repeatedly contacted for nine years.

Transcript

00:00Jenny has a truly shocking story. So after her husband died in 2014, she told Telstra

00:09and she did this via calls and emails. She even went into a Telstra store, she says,

00:15but nothing seemed to work. And some of the Telstra staff, she says, told her that they

00:19needed to speak to the account holder, which of course was her dead husband. And so she

00:24compares the situation she was in to being stuck in a Monty Python skit, some kind of

00:31dark comedy where she couldn't get out of it. And it was only after she did a story

00:37with us and complained directly to the CEO that something happened. And unfortunately,

00:42this seems like it's not a one-off occurrence at all.

00:46Jenny and another family complained about similar conduct and it found in its investigation

00:53that Telstra had a gap in its processes that caused anguish for many bereaved families,

00:59but it won't be taking action. And that's because the industry code that the industry

01:04itself writes and is upheld by the regulator doesn't have any provisions for this. So

01:11they simply can't take any enforcement action. So Telstra will escape any penalty for this.

01:17And that's despite us having spoken to 20 families in this situation. And just today,

01:24more people have been contacting me with similar stories.

01:27The industry says that it's considering the request from the regulator to fix this as

01:33part of a review into the code that's underway at the moment. But it goes into a bigger conversation,

01:39I think, about regulation of the telco sector, with consumer groups really concerned that

01:44there aren't tough, meaningful penalties here or tough, meaningful obligations and

01:50stiff penalties if companies do the wrong thing. And that's a conversation that's going

01:55to play out for some time to come as negotiations over the code happen. And the Minister watches

02:01this closely.

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