I gave an old handset to my daughter to use for emergencies i.e. text or calls to my wife or I.  It was using a pre-paid optus card that allows us to keep credit for up to like 6 or 12 months (I actually forget but quite a while)  We recently recharged the thing, thinking that the last lot of credit went quite quick.  But from the 10th to the 23rd of April she went through nearly $30 of credit over that period with a handful of text messages $0.29 each (not complaining about that) but most of the charges were short bursts of Internet access.  Now admittedly she does use internet at home we have wifi and it connects to our wireless modem router.

But anyway she told me today the credit is nearly out, so we logged on to have a look and noticed she is getting Internetbrowsing and socialnwk charges of $1.32 a pop.  Today alone she had 4 of them so I could be certain it was wifi.

Now what really blows me away is that I realised these charges today were happening while she was at home using wifi.  So I spoke with an optus representative online via text, here is some of the text that I copied from the conversation, please note it isn't the full conversation as personal details were required.

Now can you believe what she is saying, I can be using my home wifi and still accruing data charges from optus for data that they are not supplying.  Is anyone able to give me any valid reasons for this.  I know that if I'm using 3G at home it is quite slow.  But when I connect to my wifi router I get much faster speeds so I just can't understand it.  She stated that she feels it isn't right being charged for something that I'm not using.  Has anyone seemed to have had this problem?  I got her to turn off internet usage from the account.  But it would be nice to be able to use the internet if needed when we are out.