Extortionate Data Charges On Orange

After complaining about Orange's data charges for GPRS in a few blog entries lately, this month I have found myself stung for 40.18UKP (excluding VAT in data charges alone.

I called Orange to complain that I thought the bill was incorrect and I couldn't have used the 38MB they claim I have. They have looked at their logs, which they claim they can't share with me (surely they must under the Data Protection Act?), and they say on Friday 7th January, my phone made repeated data calls, sometimes up to 3 times a minute between 12:09 and 17:25. Each call transmitted 102445 bytes of data. It seems very strange to me, so I have requested they pass it to their backend team to investigate the charges as I think they are wrong. I can't think of anything I have on my phone that would produce that much traffic, and of such a precise size each time. I also would have been at work on Friday, so wouldn't have used my phone that much.

They called back today to inform me their backend team has confirmed the network usage, but as it appears to be accidental, they'd only charge me half the price. This seems to be the best of bad deal, so I have accepted it.

I wonder if there is a vulnerability with the Nokia 7610, maybe with Bluetooth, that allowed this to happen. Unfortunately the log on the phone only gives the total amount of data transferred from the phone, not when. It would be nice to have a better log, so I wonder if anyone has written a better logger for series 60 phones? Of course, what would be better is access to the logs (that Orange won't share) of my phones usage, including the destination IP address of any network traffic.