Blocked from using internet and calls abroad! Spending cap

[ay98182]

My phone internet and calls are not working abroad. I travelled to the EU and was expecting those things to work seamlessly at a Go Roam location. I was happy to pay £2 for this. However, I am not even able to make calls (or send texts) to my wife, let alone use data, leading to a very stressful situation while abroad.

When I turned on data roaming I got the following message:

“Your daily roaming charge is £1.67. This includes VAT, where it applies. You've now unlocked your UK allowances in our Go Roam in Europe destinations for 24 hours at no extra charge.”

But I also got this message at the same time:

“Hi there, You've hit your credit limit. Until your next bill date, you won't be able to access services outside of your allowances - unless you make a payment.”

My internet just hangs there (despite full bars and a 5G reception), and when I try to call anyone I get the following message:

“You have reached this message because the call you are trying to make is chargeable and you have reached the spending cap on your account”

This is incorrect - as verified by several Live Chat staff.

I spoke to the Live Chat staff through the My3 app, and my case was escalated to Tech Support - but I got disconnected several times as I was forced to use my wife’s hotspot, which was being a bit erratic. I tried many fixes (as suggested by the Live Chat staff), and nothing worked at all. This is everything I tried as advised by them:

⁃ reset the phone many times
⁃ connected manually to every available roaming network
⁃ reset the network settings to factory settings
⁃ reset the phone APN settings and reconnected manually to the roaming networks
⁃ set my spending cap to £9999

The staff at Live Chat and the Tech Team were friendly and responsive, and they made changes to my account and line to try to rectify the issue. But I spent hours on this with no fix at all, until my battery died.

The staff confirmed that I was not at my credit limit, and that I had no unbilled charges on my account (except for that £1.67) so it couldn’t be me hitting my spending cap. They also ran checks and couldn’t see any issues with my line or my account.

Yet I still can’t even place calls, much less browse the internet. I paid for a service I couldn’t use. I am abroad without a working phone. And I still have no clue what is going wrong.

One of the staff actually suggested to me that I try buying a further 3 Day Roaming Pass. Why?? I had just paid £2 for a service I couldn’t use, and I didn’t need a 3 day pass, I needed it for 1 day. And there was no guarantee that it would even work. It felt less like Tech Support and more like someone winging it.

I am incredibly disappointed by the service that I’ve received; I’m paying a lot of money for a new phone, and I expect it to be able to do basic things like navigation, messaging and calls when I am abroad and very much in need of all those things.

What am I supposed to do??

I’m on an iPhone 15 on iOS 17.5.1

[tarantella]

Have you checked with Customer Services that your Credit Limit isn't set to £1 ?

This is different to the Spending Cap......

[JonathanB]

Hi @ay98182,

I think @tarantella is spot on here, you have an Actual Credit Limit, as well as the Spend Limit. If this has been inadvertently set too low it could be causing exactly this problem. I'd recommend to give customer services one more go and if you ask them to check the credit limit as opposed to spend limit, I'm sure this can all be sorted out.

Thanks,
Jonathan

[ay98182]

Hi @JonathanB , many thanks for your reply - I did ask about this and was told that I still had £179 left on my credit limit (separate from my spending cap). But I will check this again with Live Chat (and will update here). I just upgraded my phone and signed a contact, could it be some glitch to do with that?

Thank you @tarantella too.

its really frustrating because precisely when I’m travelling and on the go all the time, and I don’t have a phone network that works at all, it’s difficult to reliably access Live Chat.

[ay98182]

@JonathanB Just to update people in case it’s useful for others having the same issues down the line. I spoke to Live Chat again and confirmed that my Credit Limit still had £179 left on it (there’s also something called the Data Roaming Allowance btw, which is yet another separate limit). Anyway, I hadn’t reached any of those limits. 

With the Three Tech Support team, we figured out it was likely three separate issues going on, hence my confusion. My wife’s phone number was saved in my phone without the “+44” prefix (I didn’t know this), and that’s why I kept getting sent to the “Spend Cap reached” automated message. As soon as I put the +44 it worked perfectly. She wasn’t receiving my texts because she had a separate issue with her phone abroad (she’s on another provider). As soon as I texted someone else (actually this time without the +44 for some reason, as recommended by Tech Support), it worked. So just a tip to try both ways if you’re having trouble. 

Now, as regards the data/internet problems, by the time I got a stable connection to Live Chat I was no longer in the EU and still travelling, with £5/mb costs, so I didn’t want to lose a lot of money testing it out. I still don’t know what was going on with my data connection in the EU country I was in, maybe it was a local network problem (although I tried multiple roaming providers on the day, and tried resetting all of my network settings, with no luck). The Tech Team were sure it would be fine now though, and I’ll test it on the way back.

One other thing it could be, the Tech team said, is if the Spend Cap is much higher than the Credit Limit, sometimes there are issues. Although that wasn’t the case for me when the data first didn’t work.

As for why I kept getting texts that I had reached my Credit Limit or my Spend Cap, it must have been some kind of glitch, but really added to my confusion at the time. 

Hope this helps someone!

[JonathanB]

Hey @ay98182,

Thanks for the update, and glad to hear there was a solution. Sorry to hear we got distracted by something of a red herring though in terms of the credit limit.

That does make sense, if you dial a number with a 0 instead of the +44, your phone will be trying to locate a "local" number which may or may not exist depending on how the country you're in format numbers.

It's a similar principle to how on landline networks you can often dial numbers in the same geographic area by only using the last 6 or 7 digits.

Please let us know how you get on when you are next testing on the way back home.

Thanks,
Jonathan

[ay98182]

@JonathanB ah no worries at all, thanks for your help and all the info and for taking the time 🙂 - it was good to learn about all these limits anyway as I had no idea before (except for the spend cap). And maybe it’ll help someone down the line. Yes definitely will update on my way back in a few weeks. Have a great August!

Many thanks,

Anton

[Player1]

Hi, this happened to me in Australia, I had y to o ask the live chat person to increase my spend cap, for some reason though I really really had to ask them and keep asking until he actually did it. Just seemed reluctant to do it.

but anyway, another thing to check is that you didn’t set your own spend cap in the app or through the 3 website. 

[ay98182]

Hi Player1, thanks for your response and advice - I did have a spend cap of £20 but I had only used £2-5 maximum. But also the Live Chat staff increased my Spending Cap to £9999 (and I got a confirmation text), and still nothing works, so it can’t be that. It has to be a glitch that needs to be resolved at their end.