The mobile phone firm phone firm Vodafone PLC (LON:VOD) has been fined by the UK regulator Ofcom for “serious and sustained breaches of consumer protection rules”.
The financial sanction, at £4.6mln, is unlikely to rank as anything more than a flea bite for a company a company that turned over £41bn last year.
Ofcom found Voda charged certain pay-as-you-go customers for top-up credit but failed to carry out credit their accounts.
It also said the company had broke rules on handling customer complaints.
The findings and the fines emanated from two earlier investigations of the group, which has 20mln British customers.
The first concluded that 10,452 pay-as-you-go customers were affected when Vodafone omitted to top up their accounts.
The watchdog said it "failed to act quickly enough to identify or address these problems", which were IT-related.
The second Ofcom probe concluded customer service agents were not given clear guidance on what constituted a complaint from a user.
Vodafone offered its “profound apologies”.