Lebara, what a con
This is the tale of yet another crappy British telecoms provider. On 2025-12-05, I bought and paid for 30GB per month Lebara data SIM card from its Amazon store. But the SIM card Lebara sent was ONLY 25GB. What a con!
I did not notice that I had been cheated, until it was too late. This is because the service was an emergency stopgap, necessitated by my 91 year old mother being ‘accidentally’ cut off by another shambolic UK internet provider, Global 4. Indeed, I probably would not have mentioned it at all. My mother is a modest internet user. She uses it to catch up on the news, order her groceries, and let the family know she’s OK sending us all an email every morning. Consequently, she actually used less than half her allowance anyway.
The tip of the proverbial iceberg
However I immediately noticed how pisspoor Lebara’s ‘customer service’ is, the second I attempted to register the SIM card. You have to register it in order to get your discounted service for the next two months. What Lebara doesn’t tell you in its glossy ads, is that you need to put the card a phone, not a modem, in order to get the registration code required to get your discount. Well my card is in a modem, 35km away. So I rang Lebara. Some virtually unintelligible individual answered the phone. He wasn’t remotely interested in helping us, and told me to use Lebara’s online ‘chat’ instead.
Its chat took over an hour to resolve the problem, and only did so partially. The chat person insisted that I register before he/she would give me the registration code. That is the code that I need to register in the first place! Conversation went round and round in circles. I’m guessing Lebara hopes its customers will just give up and go away. Eventually he/she gave me a code that worked.
Moreover, I still don’t know whether the extra £10 I just paid will cover two months as advertised or just one. Its online SIM management system is bloody awful and tells you nothing useful. Granted, the SIM works. But being ‘short changed’ in this manner and having to suffer its appallingly bad aftercare gave me little option but to go into print, in order to warn others.
Updates
- 2026-01-10 10:08 To add insult to injury, Lebara has now started spamming me by email, despite my never giving it permission to do so.
- 2026-01-10 20:37 Written to Lebara with full details, invoice etc. I await an explanation.
