Disappearing phone credit?

[belodion]

Has anyone else experienced unexplained and substantial losses of credit? I have myself, several times, with losses out of all proportion to the usage of the phone as recorded by both the stock usage app and a third-party usage app. This is with different phones using different SIMs, using the 3 UK network's PAYG. Because it's PAYG, no detailed breakdown of usage is available, so you have to trust that they're right when they say that, to take one example, you've used over 500mb of data in three days, when in fact you've used about 50mb as recorded by the phone and your own knowledge of how little you've used it.
I've found that seeking help and explanation from them is useless. Forum members like us know how to keep track of usage, and can tell when something is wrong with charges, but convincing the carrier that you know what you're talking about is impossible.
I'm willing to bet that this occurs on other networks.

 

[Rukbat]

Strange. Since I set many apps to auto-update, I haven't noticed any large increase in data usage, but I have noticed a lot of apps showing "updated" notifications. That's with AT&T PAYG in the US, so 3 may be doing things differently. (Way back, the phone recorded the voice call to the second, but the companies charged by the minute, so any calls that ended just after the 'tick' to the next minute effectively cost you an additional minute over what the phone showed. Maybe 3 is charging by the next whole MB [or even the next whole 10MB]?)

I guess there's not much you can do, though, unless there's an alternate carrier that gives you the same coverage (and you can try them for 2 months, to get a whole month of usage to compare).

 

[belodion]

It happened again a couple of days ago and a change of carrier is indeed under consideration, if only as a diagnostic, since I have no other way of finding out where the cause lies.