Thousands of Vodafone Ireland customers complained to the telecoms firm yesterday after a technical fault saw a promotional SMS sent repeatedly to up to 15,000 customers.
Thousands of Vodafone Ireland customers complained after a promotional SMS was sent repeatedly to up to 15,000 customers.
The promotion was being run by Opera Telecom (Ireland) and involved a mobile scratchcard being sent by agreement via Vodafone yesterday to a database of mobile numbers provided by one of its customers Black Dog Communications.
However an technical problem on the Vodafone system resulted in the SMS being sent repeatedly, in some cases up to 20 times.
Complaints to Vodafone last night saw the error corrected and the message stopped at around 10pm but a spokeswoman for the company admitted they had received up to 5,000 complaints about the issue.
The Vodafone spokesman said there were no costs associated with recieving the promotion and no customers have been billed on receipt of the message.
Vodafone also said that the cost of SMSes to the number on the promotion trying to opt-out would also be refunded to consumers.
"People were not happy and we accept that there was a problem. Whatever costs associated with customers trying to opt-out of this message will be refunded by Vodafone," she said.
She said an database of up to 30,000 customers would have been targetted by promotion but that owing to the error, it would have probably only have gone to around 15,000 customers.
The database used for these promotions is made up of customers who would have previously entered a competition via their mobile.
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