I don't think I've ever encountered something so tricky before. In fact, I think the last time I had to go through a load of hoops to get a contract it was my first BT line at Uni when I had to use my mum's existing contract to back mine up.

But having watched Lo fail two out of three mobile phone credit checks and remembering the palaver I went through to get onto O2 in 2003 I'm a bit shocked by how hard it is to set up a contract. Do people regularly rip mobile phone companies off or is it just that no one's updated the system in the past 15 years?

And why do you have to pay money to some shower of bastards like Equifax to not even really find out for sure why you failed it? The arcane nature of these things annoys me.

(For the record she got refused by Three even though she'd only left them at the end of her contract a couple of months before to go onto a sim-only deal until a better phone deal arrived. And she passed the O2 one but they then pointed out how shit their deals now were... Dunno, it's clear she SHOULD be okay but WTF?)