Vodafone’s fights iPhone defection by taking customer service offline

We love a good conspiracy theory as much as the next guy, but they usually amount to nothing more than paranoid thinking. Then again, sometimes the coincidences can’t be ignored. The Inquirer’s got a conspiracy theory that’s just too juicy to dismiss off-hand.

The theory goes something like this:

• iPhone launches in Europe
• Vodafone (NYSE: VOD) is not an iPhone carrier
• Vodafone wants to prevent huge customer-base losses to the iPhone
• Vodafone takes customer service offline to prevent customer cancelations

Vodafone’s customer service line for customer cancellations is dead – it’s been dead since the iPhone’s launch last Friday. The helpful recorded message blames a “system fault” and kindly suggests that the customer call back later.

Is Vodafone fighting cancellation-spikes due to iPhone-defectors by taking down its service-cancellation hotline? Or are they just experiencing a legit system bug? We don’t know for sure, but it’s fun to wax conspiratorially.

[Via: The Inquirer]