Telstra's "pink bus" travels to remote communities to help Indigenous clients, but financial counsellors have concerns the outreach service is not helping victims of mis-selling get the compensation they're entitled to.
“Both times, she’d been told her debt had been waived and given a recharge (phone) voucher,” said Fiona Pettiford, a financial counsellor with Anglicare NT.
Telstra told the ABC customers did not always feel comfortable sharing personal details with staff on the pink bus, and sometimes it relied on financial counsellors to find out more.
“If they have a poor credit rating because of that debt, they might be still sitting there and impacting that client’s financial life, and also many of those people may be due a refund with penalty interest.”
“We’ve had a number of cases where people have visited the pink bus and either had a debt waived or had no issues identified, only later to be found out there was mis-selling,” he told the ABC.
Most of the clients who were sold expensive data plans — 82 per cent — were either unemployed or on low incomes and more than half were single parents, carers or pensioners.
Mr Wildy said when it came to compensation cases, ICAN was often finding itself in conflict with Telstra over the extent of a client’s vulnerability and the harm caused to that person.
The original article contains 1,107 words, the summary contains 193 words. Saved 83%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
“Both times, she’d been told her debt had been waived and given a recharge (phone) voucher,” said Fiona Pettiford, a financial counsellor with Anglicare NT.
Telstra told the ABC customers did not always feel comfortable sharing personal details with staff on the pink bus, and sometimes it relied on financial counsellors to find out more.
“If they have a poor credit rating because of that debt, they might be still sitting there and impacting that client’s financial life, and also many of those people may be due a refund with penalty interest.”
“We’ve had a number of cases where people have visited the pink bus and either had a debt waived or had no issues identified, only later to be found out there was mis-selling,” he told the ABC.
Most of the clients who were sold expensive data plans — 82 per cent — were either unemployed or on low incomes and more than half were single parents, carers or pensioners.
Mr Wildy said when it came to compensation cases, ICAN was often finding itself in conflict with Telstra over the extent of a client’s vulnerability and the harm caused to that person.
The original article contains 1,107 words, the summary contains 193 words. Saved 83%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!