The free laptop is a great incentive - if you can get it

The free laptop is a great incentive - if you can get it

It's one of the most appealing broadband deals on offer: a free laptop if you agree to take out Carphone Warehouse/AOL's £20-a-month contract for two years. But six months after she signed up (and paid extra for a better laptop) one customer is at the end of her tether, with no computer, mysteriously cancelled contracts, non-existent refunds and endlessly frustrating attempts to contact the company.

East London caterer and mother Diana Ivankovic contacted Guardian Money in a final attempt to obtain a refund of £165 owed to her by Carphone Warehouse. Last November, along with thousands of others, she signed up to the Carphone Warehouse/AOL offer that promised a free laptop to anyone agreeing to pay for a minimum of two years' broadband.

She had been an AOL customer for 10 years and checked with the operator that she would qualify for the deal. "After confirming that as an existing AOL customer I would be eligible, I agreed to pay £164.95 [for an upgraded laptop and delivery] and was told to wait 28 days.

"But a month later there was no laptop, just a confirmation letter from AOL to say that my old customer details would be updated and transferred to a new contract," she says.

Eventually it transpired that Carphone Warehouse had cancelled her order because a member of their staff put in the wrong details. But the company did not tell her, and since then, despite numerous calls to the firm, she is no nearer to getting her money.....continued below

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back. Neither does she understand why the contract was cancelled and whether it was because she was an existing customer. "I was fairly fed up having been messed around - but when I asked when I would be getting the refund, I was told that I needed to wait for authorisation and that the cheque would follow in the post. Of course, it never arrived."

Since then, says she has been given numerous reasons as to why her refund has not been processed. "I've never dealt with a company like this before - they are either incredibly incompetent, or there is a policy of withholding customers' cash - I'm still no nearer to deciding which it is," she says.

Ivankovic is not alone. Last year we featured the case of retired teacher Ann Gordon, from Romford, Essex, who was forced to send bailiffs in to Carphone Warehouse subsidiary TalkTalk's west London headquarters in a bid to recover the £630 she was awarded in the small claims court.

Gordon went to court after being left without a landline phone for more than six weeks. Even after she won her case, the company, which she accused of being "unbelievably arrogant", still refused to pay up.

After Guardian Money raised the latest complaint with Carphone Warehouse, the company responded swiftly.

This week it said it had refunded her bank card, and to say sorry, it has now said it will send her the laptop for free.

The company issued the following statement: "Unfortunately, due to an administrative error, Mrs Ivankovic's free laptop deal was incorrectly processed and her laptop was never delivered. Whilst waiting for a refund, Mrs Ivankovic upgraded her account to a standard AOL broadband package without any subsidised hardware. We apologise for any inconvenience that Mrs Ivankovic may have experienced and will send her out a free laptop as a gesture of goodwill."

"I'll be delighted - if it turns up," she says. "I'm not going to believe it until I see it with my own eyes."