Cellphone users listen up! The phone that your service provider sells you as new may not be new after all. This is what Liz Collins from Cape Town found out when it was time to upgrade her Cell C contract.
Her "new" phone was delivered to her by hand, in a sealed box, but when she switched the phone on, there were somebody else's SMSs as well as a list of names in the phone book.
She then phoned one of the numbers on the phone as a way of tracing the "owner". It turned out that the details on the phone were those of John Crawford, who stayed in Johannesburg.
It appeared that Crawford was given the supposedly new phone by Cell C as a replacement phone after he had lost his. Cell C contract customers are insured by the cellphone service provider.
Crawford said he had returned the phone to Cell C because he specifically wanted a phone with a camera and had put his SIM card on that phone to be able to operate it.
"I switched the phone on and off again after I found that it had no camera. I returned it immediately the following day," said Crawford.
Collins said it was clear that the phone had been somewhere else and she was going to pay for a "not so new phone".
She said she was promised a new phone by the service provider - but can consumers trust that they are getting a new phone from Cell C the next time they buy a phone?
Vinnie Santu, media liaison for Cell C, said: "This was a highly improbable and isolated incident. The handset returned by Mr Crawford was inadvertently mistaken for a new handset and issued to Ms Collins in error.
"It is not our policy to reissue returned handsets on contract and we regret this incident."