So this is the SECOND year I've dealt with this exact same garbage.
I live overseas. My parent went into a Koodo store, bought me a 30-day-only prepaid SIM, paid on their credit card. The rep looked us both in the eye and said "yep, I checked the only-30-days box, you won't be billed after that." We said thanks and left. Guess what showed up on the card this month? A second charge.
Then I go to check the paperwork from that visit and find out my email is typed wrong — so I've been getting zero notifications this whole time. And right at the bottom, in black and white, it says "automatic monthly renewal." The literal opposite of what we were told to our faces.
And here's the kicker: last year, when this same thing happened, Koodo customer care told me not to even touch my own SIM — don't make a call, don't send a text, nothing — because apparently just using it for a second can trigger ANOTHER auto-renewal charge. So now I've got a wrong email AND a phone number I'm too scared to use.
So my parent calls in about the charge on THEIR OWN CARD, and is told only I can deal with it, since I'm the account holder. Come on! It's their card. Their money. Why does the account holder get exclusive veto power over charges to someone else's credit card?
And now that I'm back abroad, I genuinely can't do anything about this myself. Which got me thinking about how much bigger this problem probably is than just me. Picture how many tourists visit Canada, grab a prepaid SIM at a Koodo store for their trip, fly home, and have no idea they've been signed up for automatic monthly renewal until a strange charge shows up on a statement back in their own currency, weeks later. Then imagine trying to dispute a charge from a Canadian company, in Canadian dollars, from another country, in another language, on a completely different bank's timeline. That's not a rare edge case — that's probably a huge chunk of Koodo's prepaid tourist customers.
And a lot of these sign-ups probably look exactly like mine: Imagine a parent from China buying a SIM for their child's trip to Canada. They sign it up under the child's name, since it's the child's phone and the child's SIM — but pay with their own credit card, because the child doesn't even have one yet. Now the account holder is the child, the person actually getting charged is the parent, and once they're both back home, neither of them has any real way to fix it. The child can't act because it's not their card. The parent can't act because it's not their account. And they're now doing this from China, likely in Mandarin, trying to explain a Canadian billing dispute to their own bank.
On top of all that, think about who gets stuck in this trap even within Canada — a customer calling the call centre and getting a rep whose first language isn't English, or whose accent is too strong for them to follow. For people in any of these situations, "only the account holder can cancel" doesn't lead to a fix. It leads them to just call their bank and report the card stolen, because that's the only button they can actually push. That's not them being dramatic, that's the company leaving them no other option.
I've filed a full written complaint through Koodo Assist (got escalated to some management queue) and CCTS is next if nothing happens. Mostly posting this so someone else doesn't get burned the same way twice like I did: get everything in writing before you leave the store, check your email is spelled right, and if you're not the account holder, your bank might genuinely be your only real defense against Koodo.
