Currently on their standard Dolphin PayG tariff that gives 400 texts and 100Mb of internet for a tenner top up. However, when I bought the San Diego phone it was sold on the basis of an extra 150Mb of data for the first 12 months.

Now I know I don't send 400 texts in a month, and my phone's data usage app shows I have used only around 28Mb of data this month. So even if that's a bit under, as these apps sometimes are, that is a hell of a long way off the 250Mb limit.

But yet again, for the third month in a row, Orange has seen fit to remove all my credit, down to £0.00.

So before I go phoning Orange tomorrow I thought I would ask, has anyone else experience their credit mysteriously disappearing all the time, even though you're under the limits?. If you did, and contacted Orange, what did they say?.

Just phone Orange. No one can answer this but them as they will need to look into your account.

I intend to, but thought I'd ask if it had happened to anyone else and what the outcome was. Mainly curious, but might give me some ammo to use when I ring them.

First thing that came to mind was a rouge app sending texts or something like that...

That was the first thing I thought of too. But Avast Mobile Security shows nothing out of the ordinary. I also installed a couple of permission checkers and they show nothing out of the ordinary either.

A quick Google though shows up many people on Orange Dolphin complaining of the same sort of thing.

I'll call them tomorrow and see what they have to say.

A similar thing happened to us when my wife got a San Diego. A check on the Orange online account which details recent usage showed data transfer charges which were killing the topups even before the free Dolphin data was applied. This was data transfer in the middle of the night when we were asleep, at about £5/Mb. Figured it had to be app or OS updates and ended up getting a cheap 12 month SiM only contract which was cheaper than a £10 topup to get free texts/data.

Let us know how you got on with Orange.

I recently purchased a Huawei G300 on Vodaphone PAYG from Sainsburys. The G300 went wrong within two weeks, so I returned it for a refund, but I kept the SIM as I had put some credit on it. I also have two Orange PAYG SIMs.

When looking at the Vodaphone PAYG plans, I noticed that they seemed to have virtually identical plans to Orange. But the significant difference is that Vodaphone spell out the fact that the texts and internet included in each PAYG plan are time limited -- the unused parts expire after one month. So you need to top up at least £10 each month in order to get a continuing stream of text and internet credit. (The voice credit is not time limited, but you need to make at least one phone call every 180 days.)

I have just had a look at the Orange web site, and they do not state this condition anywhere obvious. But the plans are so similar between Orange and Vodaphone that I would be surprised if Orange did not have this condition somewhere in their small print.

-- from CyberSimian in the UK