October 27, 2013by cheesie96 Comments❤︎47 Prefectures❤︎

Tep Wireless – The worst thing ever

In my entire 9 years of blogging experience, i have probably lost my cool several times and ranted about a few individuals who ruined my day. But never had i been so angry at a company before that i actually contemplated to publicly shame it. That’s how angry i’m feeling right now.

If you stumbled upon this blog site by googling the review of Tep Wireless service, congratulations. You just saved yourself lots of heartache and trouble. let me summarize it for you.

1. The device rarely works (a simple googling around and you will find tons of angry users). 

Example: this blog post

2. If it does, you are one very very very lucky person and likely will go to heaven too.

3. If it doesn’t, be very sure that it is going to ruin your holiday AND you will never see your money ever again.

4. You may as well throw the money on a random Roulette number now, because even that is a better gamble than this.

 

If you have never heard of Tep Wireless, here’s my very long story. The short story is never ever ever let them have your money. Period.

So this Tep Wireless thing is a pocket wifi that (supposedly) helps you stay connected to the internet when you travel. It is a UK based company. I’m sorry to all you English people, but this is indeed the shittiest company i’ve ever encountered.

I have always rented pocket wifi devices with a Japanese company when i travel to Japan. They were super fast, super long lasting (battery) and it saves my life. So in May early this year, the danna and i were going for our Weddingmoon, so i searched around and looked for a pocket wifi device too in Europe, since we were traveling to multiple countries.

And from the day i rented it and paid with credit card, everything could possibly go wrong went wrong.

 

 

My plan was to have it delivered to Santorini (our first destination), and then return it when we travel to London towards the end.

First of all the device never arrived on time. Amie from Sunrisegreece had to make frantic phone calls to make sure we get it before we left Greece. In the end i had to collect it from Athens airport, with the help and trouble of many people.

So my rental period was delayed, i sent and email to explain the situation, and they promised to adjust the rate accordingly. (But of course, they never did.)

 

Fine. So i got it, and i was excited to use it. It worked.

We flew to Rome, and it worked okay (so-so coverage on certain areas). The package that i signed up for was a cheaper one that gives me a 150MB of data daily, capped at 5GB throughout the rental period. I reckon that would be enough for us to just google for some travel tips occasionally, as i could always do the heavy updates (blog/Instagram) at night using hotel wifi. And that alone already cost me something like RM700.

On the third day, we arrived in Venice. The device did not work anymore. I restarted and troubleshooted etc etc, to no avail. In the end i had to make long roaming calls from Italy to UK to find out what happened, and apparently i hit data limit of 5GB within 3 days. (?!?!??!)

It was shocking to know, since they website say they will send you notification emails when your data is at 70% and 9o% limit respectively, so you can opt to upgrade your data plan.

Anyway, desperate, i called them to upgrade my device to unlimited data plan, which i had to pay another extra RM400 or so.

The device then work okay until Barcelona, it just completely stopped working. Since it is on unlimited data which i just freshly upgraded to, it’s impossible i hit the limit again.

(After that they explained to me it was a major network problem that affected many other users. As you can see in the email conversation below. How reliable.)

It took me yet several roaming calls to them to troubleshoot, to absolute no avail.

In the end i decided the device is just simply shitty, and returned it when i went to London and bought a local sim card instead.

That was the end of having the device which didn’t work more than it did. Went all the way to Paddington to return the device personally, in case the Auto-Return envelope gets lost or they just refuse to acknowledge having received it (can you believe it? They don’t use registered mail so there’s no way you can track).

 

 

 

During my 3 weeks of travel, it only worked half the time, for the RM1000+ i have paid.

So naturally when i returned to Malaysia, i sent the team an email explaining the situation.

And on 24 JUNE, they agreed to give me a refund, AFTER my constant pestering via email.

 

 

Keep in mind. The first refund promise was made in JUNE, 2013.

 

 

Then…

After more than a month.

 

They replied.

 

 

They wanted to pretend dunno about the refund again and wanted to offer me a free (shitty) rental for my next trip.

 

 

No reply for a week.  

After one week, they finally replied.  

 

I replied. Was being really really patient about it.

 

After a few more follow-ups, they finally, for the first time, confirmed a refund date. I was really relieved.

 

 

No joke. My trip certainly was shittier as a result.

And then the so-called Friday has passed. No news for another week. 

 Cannot believe i was still being so civilised. And then guess what they replied me with?

 

 

Finally i flipped. No matter how nice a person i tried to be, there’s no reason i should put up with this bullshit. And for the first time i was being stern about it.

 

 

And then they made me a promised, which was a refund by NO LATER THAN 20 SEP.

 

 

I was sort of relieved again. 

 

 

And then, 20 Sep has passed. No news. I checked my account. No refund. However, they sent me an email asking if i did a charge-back on my credit card.

 

 

“We must verify this before issuing the refund.”

What they really meant was,

“We must verify that this idiot didn’t ask her bank to charge us back, before we could fuck off for good and ignore her HAHAHAHAH”

 

I replied .

 

And that was the end of it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I sent a few more emails to chase them after that, no reply whatsoever.

 

The moment they knew i didn’t charge back my credit card, (which is long expired by now, i can’t do anything about it with my bank), they just totally disappeared into thin air.

 

Just like they said (in the email):

Oh and when it does not, rest assured you will never hear from them ever again.

 

 

I tried calling the center, nobody ever picked up the phone call. I left messages on their FB page multiple times. No reply. (I suspect they also deleted my “nasty comments” on FB.) I decided i couldn’t waste even one more cent on this shit company with all that international calls.

I lost all hope now, not even expecting my money back anymore, but i won’t let a total fraud like Tep Wireless to get away either.

 

This is their Facbook Page.

Do me a favor and help report the page as scam.

 

I am really, really, REALLY appalled at the existence of such unethical company. Unbelievable.

Let me know if you know any other way to report such total fraud.

 

Thank you.

 

 

 

 

UPDATE:

On 29th Oct 2013, i got my refund. You can read the second blog post about Tep Wireless here.

 

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