BritBox overcharges thousands of subscribers by £550 due to billing error

BritBox overcharged a variety of subscribers (Pictures: Rex)

BritBox subscribers were in for a rude shock when they were overcharged by £550 ($757) due to an unfortunate billing mistake.

BritBox is an online digital video subscription service providing users with access to a variety of British television.

But instead of seeing a £5 ($6.99) charge to watch episodes of Poirot or Line Of Duty, users were given a rude shock to discover they’d actually been charged hundreds more than they were expecting $757 for the month of July.

The massive overcharge impacted fewer than 5,000 users.

One person who was overcharged, Texas-based paralegal Paul Sonnenberg, said he and his wife’s bank called to notify the couple that their account was overdrawn, with a $757 charge from BritBox.

After phoning customer service right away, the 61-year-old was told he wasn’t the only one who’d been massively overcharged, and that he’d have to wait until the next day to speak with billing services.

BritBox subscribers have access to shows like Line Of Duty (Picture: BBC)

‘The next day, I called again having sent a screenshot [of the bank account] and a few demanding emails and that person acknowledged that I’d had to wait so long to get through because there were lots of people calling in about this problem,’ he told Variety.

While Paul was given a complimentary four-month subscription to the service, he is upset that it has taken more than two days for him to be reimbursed.

He said: ‘They assured me they are working hard to fix it, with a resolution expected in 24-48 hours, but if I took $757 from you, how would you feel about waiting 48 hours to get it back?’

A BritBox spokesperson addressed the mistake in a statement.

More: BBC

‘We are aware that a small percentage (a fraction of 1 per cent) of our subscribers in the United States and Australia experienced an overcharge by our billing vendor yesterday,’ they said.

‘We took immediate action to correct the mistake by contacting all affected BritBox subscribers and issuing them refunds. The underlying cause has been resolved, however, this is an unacceptable experience and we deeply regret the disruption this has caused some of our subscribers.’

BritBox has approximately 1.5 million customers in North America. The streamer hasn’t yet disclosed its subscriber figure in Australia, where it launched only in November, but the total subscriber base across both markets is believed to be around 2million.

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