{"id":35881,"date":"2026-01-04T17:34:23","date_gmt":"2026-01-04T17:34:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/garfnet.org.uk\/cms\/?p=35881"},"modified":"2026-01-13T01:26:48","modified_gmt":"2026-01-13T01:26:48","slug":"lebara-what-a-con","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/garfnet.org.uk\/cms\/2026\/01\/04\/lebara-what-a-con\/","title":{"rendered":"Lebara, what a con"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>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!&nbsp;<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.co.uk\/dp\/B0DQLKFN4H\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">https:\/\/www.amazon.co.uk\/dp\/B0DQLKFN4H<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>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 <em>&#8216;<\/em>accidentally&#8217; 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&#8217;s OK sending us all an email every morning. Consequently, she actually used less than half her allowance anyway.<\/p>\n<h2>The tip of the proverbial iceberg<\/h2>\n<p>However I immediately noticed how pisspoor Lebara&#8217;s &#8216;customer service&#8217; 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&#8217;t tell you in its glossy ads, is that you need to put the card a phone, <em><strong>not<\/strong><\/em> 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&#8217;t remotely interested in helping us, and told me to use Lebara&#8217;s online &#8216;chat&#8217; instead.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-35897\" src=\"https:\/\/garfnet.org.uk\/cms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/lebara_cheated_resized-1.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2048\" height=\"1152\" srcset=\"https:\/\/garfnet.org.uk\/cms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/lebara_cheated_resized-1.jpg 2048w, https:\/\/garfnet.org.uk\/cms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/lebara_cheated_resized-1-640x360.jpg 640w, https:\/\/garfnet.org.uk\/cms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/lebara_cheated_resized-1-768x432.jpg 768w, https:\/\/garfnet.org.uk\/cms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/lebara_cheated_resized-1-1536x864.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2048px) 100vw, 2048px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Its chat took over an hour to resolve the problem, and only did so <em><strong>partially<\/strong><\/em>. 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&#8217;m guessing Lebara hopes its customers will just give up and go away. Eventually he\/she gave me a code that worked.<\/p>\n<p>Moreover, I still don&#8217;t know whether the extra \u00a310 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 &#8216;short changed&#8217; in this manner <strong>and<\/strong> having to suffer its appallingly bad aftercare gave me little option but to go into print, in order to warn others.<\/p>\n<h2>Updates<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>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.<\/li>\n<li>2026-01-10 20:37 Written to Lebara with full details, invoice etc. I await an explanation.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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!&nbsp; https:\/\/www.amazon.co.uk\/dp\/B0DQLKFN4H I did not notice that I had been cheated, until it was too&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35893,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_kad_post_transparent":"default","_kad_post_title":"default","_kad_post_layout":"default","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"default","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"default","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[19,6,746,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35881","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","category-journal","category-review","category-technology"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Lebara, what a con - GarfNet<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"I bought and paid for 30GB per month Lebara data SIM card from its Amazon store. 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