–O2’s also apparently vindictive and will use threats when challenged. Don’t just take my word for it. Check out its independent rating.
Review, survey, reporting and opinion by Mathew Carr
Aug. 4-5, 2025 — O2 is a terrible telco service provider, perhaps one of the worst in the UK, and even the world.
On top of stealing from me and my family for years, they then called in the debt collectors, when it’s O2 who owed me money.
I guess O2 saw this as some kind of “hardball negotiation” in the era of US president Mr Donald Trump.
This letter made no sense; it amounted to harassment and it’s against a slate of human rights that I hold dear…I guess it makes some sense from O2’s perspective if it is retaliatory ….because I was blowing the whistle on bad behavior at O2 to various regulators.
Cowardly Mr AJ Martin, the “debt recovery manager” who does not give his full name, yet knows mine, does not state the legal basis of his threats … because there are none.
I’ve been battling O2 for roughly five years.
A few weeks before the ramped-up threats the past few months, I had made a “data subject access” request to O2 to obtain all the data it had on me, an application which it acknowledged on May 2.
While this story of me and O2 looks like it might have something of a happy ending…O2’s behavior amounts to an unlawful harassment campaign that ran for half a decade.
My request for my data has not been met, so far.
Failing on General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) rules seems risky in theory, with fines of up to 4% of global turnover.
“Tools at our disposal include assessment notices, warnings, reprimands, enforcement notices and penalty notices (administrative fines). For serious breaches of the data protection principles, we have the power to issue fines of up to £17.5 million or 4% of your annual worldwide turnover, whichever is higher,” the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) says on its website.
O2 is owned by Telefonica which had revenue of €41 billion last year. So that would be a potential fine of €1.7 billion if the ICO was a serious regulator.
Telefonica is aware of the risks.
Snips above from Telefonica’s latest annual report.
Telefonica has a newish executive chairman Marc Murtra ….yet executive chairmen are bad governance structures….an independent chairman and board of directors should oversee a CEO, in theory.
The Financial Times says Murtra is a “fixer” — a mafia term for someone who “makes problems go away”.
Maybe I’ve been getting the Murtra mafia treatment. I feel like the victim of organised crime, that might incur a 20 year sentence under US racketeering law RICO.
On July 7, two days before the nasty, threatening letter, above, the ICO wrote to me:
The context
I complained repeatedly to O2 leading up to 2024 re my extremely bad pay-as-you go service and eventually they agreed to compensate me by giving my family and I four sim cards for a total of £20 a month.
I was happy with this Feb. 2024 deal for 12 months …. yet I smelled a rat.
And, indeed, O2 turned out to be very ratty indeed.
The company then proceeded to steal £77 a month from my family for over a year.
So O2 has stolen £684 plus I continued to pay for Giff Gaff — a rival provider on O2’s network that offers better service in many respects — for my kids ….and my wife continued to pay every month for her phone on O2 …my attempt to consolidate telco costs with o2 completely backfired.
I didn’t put my wife and kids on the plan because I knew something was up.
I called O2 up several times and asked them to stop the stealing. They have the recordings of the repeated phone calls.
Meanwhile, when travelling to Europe the service was near zero or very patchy, despite O2’s claim that it offers seamlessness with Europe while roaming.
This is a key part why I went with them originally …to get Europe-wide service. The poor connection stopped or delayed my reporting on hundreds of occasions, weakening my attempts to call out the awful state of climate action and multiple abuses of human rights by greedy billionaires.
When you call up O2 they pretend to help instead of actually helping. It’s deeply sinister, IMO.
Trustpilot data appears to back up O2’s bad reputation, yet they still blame their customers for their problems.
I wanted my money back and in April, O2 offered a non-solution “outcome”.
The regulators
What is regulator Ofcom doing about this?
On a basic level, how can it be acceptable to Ofcom that one of the biggest telco providers has a trust pilot rating of 1.2 out of 5?
Does this mean Ofcom’s rating as a regulator is even worse — perhaps less than 1 …and even worse than the much-derided Ofwat (now defunct), Ofsted or Ofgem?
Seems so.
Britain’s regulators are captured by the industries they pretend to regulate. A long-term person familiar with this situation has told me directly.
Meantime, I appear to be targeted by my bank and other companies because I’m blowing the whistle about the elite.
Some questions …
Is it true Ofcom is captured by those it is meant to regulate on behalf of the taxpayers? (Email me at mathew@carrzee.net with your views.)
I wrote to Ofcom to get information on what they are doing.
See immediately below and at the bottom of this story.
Ofcom passed the buck back to me with this “confidential” email….and tried to pass me to other regulators — yep, that old trick ….there are multiple regulators (and an ombudsman) pretending to help.
| OCCtelecoms <OCCtelecoms@ofcom.org.uk> | 30 May 2025, 11:43 |  | |
| to me | |||
Classification: CONFIDENTIAL
Ofcom reference: 02004425
30 May 2025
Dear Mr Carr
Thank you for contacting Ofcom via our online web form.
I understand from your correspondence that you have experienced issues around your service with O2. You state you were given four SIM cards for a total of £20 per month as compensation however, O2 has since taken £77 per month for over a year and so, you believe you have been mis-sold the service.
While I appreciate your concerns, it is unclear whether this issue has been caused as a direct result of a mis-sell of services or whether a billing issue has occurred as you haven’t clarified the matter further. Although we do have regulations around the mis-selling of services, as the circumstances are unclear, I am unable to confirm if these regulations would apply; from the information provided, there doesn’t appear to be any evidence of wrongdoing from O2 in this instance.
Nonetheless, we would expect providers to deal with the matter professionally, ensuring that they aim to resolve any issues within a timely manner. Ofcom regularly publishes information on the number of complaints received against each provider, and this puts further pressure on companies to provide a high standard of service.
If you are unhappy with how O2 has dealt with the matter or believe you have grounds to dispute the contract, I recommend that you take the next steps outlined within O2’s formal complaints procedure if you haven’t done so already. The details of which can be found here: http://www.o2.co.uk/how-to-complain
[This is how large companies and regulators try to waste your time and try to turn the victim into the villain — they put you into a never-ending dispute process, against UN human rights]
If you are unable to resolve your dispute with O2, you may be able to submit it to an Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) scheme. An ADR scheme is a free and independent service which can rule on financial and contractual disputes. O2 must abide by their decision; however, you can consider legal action if you are not happy with their ruling.
You can take your dispute to an ADR scheme if it remains unresolved eight weeks after you first complained, or if O2 sends you a letter outlining their final position (known as a ‘deadlock’ letter).
The ADR scheme that O2 is signed up to is Communications Ombudsman. They can be contacted at:
Communications Ombudsman
PO Box 730
Warrington
WA4 6WU
0330 440 1614
In addition, we are unable to comment on Trustpilot as we have no association with the company. In terms of our role, I should explain that Ofcom, as the telecommunications industry regulator, cannot get involved in individual cases.
We put processes in place that providers are expected to follow and set out the General Conditions of Entitlement; these are the regulatory conditions that all providers must comply with if they wish to provide a service in the UK.
While we cannot take action on an individual basis, your help in highlighting problems plays a vital part in our work as the information we receive from consumers is formally registered for industry monitoring purposes.
Should we identify that a company is in breach of our regulations or that a particular matter is causing consumer harm, we may investigate on an industry level and take action that we deem appropriate; this is the role that is set out for us by Parliament.
Thank you for taking the time to contact Ofcom, I hope the information provided has been useful.
Yours sincerely, xxxxxxxxxxx
Consumer Contact Team
———-
Chairman of Ofcom Michael Grade
I will let you know how I get on.
Happy ending?
This story has somewhat of a happy ending…but you still need to know how hard it is to get any sense of justice in the UK in 2025 out of a badly regulated multinational corporation.
See this snip from one of my bank accounts:
Telefonica, O2’s owner, did finally pay me and my family some compensation on July 22.
As you can see, it took our bank account from negative £24.90 to £709.88 that day.
Whew.
Yet, still after that payment, I’ve received threatening letters from Telefonica. Bizaare.
It shows some of the deep problems with capitalism in Britain today. It’s not capitalism that’s to blame. It’s the bad market structure and bad regulation and awful regulators.
I hate to say but Nigel Farage is kinda right. Britain is lawless because US interests and multinational corporations are on the take take take.
Which takes me bback to the Information Commissioner’s Office, ICO, which sent this:
It indicates 36 complaints against O2 in January-March 2025 alone.
EG
I FIND THIS disturbing:
“We do not have the power to prosecute organisations for failure to respond to subject access requests”: ICO
Data Subject Access Requests (DSARs) were meant to place in the hands of the people, taxpayers, ownership and control of their data. You are meant to be able to request data held by people/companies/govts.
Yet, the regulator claims it doesn’t have the power to prosecute failure in this regard.
What the actual fuck?
UK Information Commissioner John Edwards
Serious Fraud Office Investigation since 2021
I got in touch with the Serious Fraud Office to see if they had complaints against O2 and to see how the 4-year long investigation was going.
And finally … I want to link my treatment by O2 with my attempts to call out very bad climate action and regulation
In January 2024, for instance, I was trying to report flooding in Hackney Wick, near my home in London. I was travelling in Europe at the time.
O2 made it near impossible to report what was going on. I could not connect to the internet.
If O2 is in cahoots with other elite folks to prevent the proper reporting of climate damage, the people of Britain are in serious risk. It’s not just O2. Google, HSBC, HMRC, WordPress are among other companies that seem to be slowing me down.
The people of the world, indeed, are in deep trouble if multinational companies are allowed to run amok. The people, taxpayers, expect their governments to act on their behalf to protect the climate and nature….and their data and privacy….and to make sure businesses deliver what they say they will.
How deep is the climate-killing British-American deep state? Crushingly deep.
See these reports.
NOTES
O2/Virgin/Telefonica has a history of compliance problems
—-
Ofcom has already sanctioned O2 twice: first for overcharging customers and second for providing inaccurate information.
1. Overcharging Customers: O2 was fined £10.5 million for overcharging over 140,000 customers between 2011 and 2019 due to billing errors when customers left the network. These errors led to customers being billed for some charges twice. Ofcom’s investigation found that these errors resulted in over £2.4 million being incorrectly charged to customers.
2. Providing Inaccurate Information: Ofcom also fined O2 £150,000 for providing inaccurate and incomplete responses to information requests during an investigation. This contributed to the investigation taking longer than necessary. Ofcom’s investigation also stated that O2 demonstrated a level of carelessness in responding to their requests. Ofcom’s fine also notes that O2 had previously failed to provide accurate and complete information.
Investigations by Which Magazine also backs up its poor ranking for O2’s service.
…….