I wondered if anyone could offer any advice on a problem my wife is currently having ending a mobile contract with Vivacom. We spent most of this year in Bulgaria with the expectation/hope of staying until the end of the year, but came back to the UK in August. In the January my wife (who is Bulgarian) had taken out a 12-month mobile contract with Vivacom, and just before we left for the UK she went in to a Vivacom store to enquire about the best way to deal with the situation with the contract. The advice she received was that rather than end it there and then and pay a large fee for ending the contract early, it would be netter to continue paying the monthly fees until it ran out (for this we arranged her niece to go into the Vivacom shop every month to make the payment).
The contract however would not just automatically end after 12 months, so it would be necessary to give them one month's notice for it to finish, and in writing - an actual letter, so no email (mobile and internet providers obviously not yet ready to start trusting new technologies). It wasn't possible to give this notice more than one month before, as it had to be EXACTLY one month before! This meant that my wife couldn't give the notice before we left Bulgaria, and instead had to leave a letter with her niece giving her permission to give this notice to end the contract when the time came, so we thought this would be (relatively!) straightforward. Now it turns out that the letter must be stamped by a lawyer/notary as the letter is a legal document giving authority for someone else to act on her behalf, so the advice we have (short of my wife travelling to Bulgaria to do this herself) is that the only way to prevent the contract continuing beyond the initial 12 months she (thought she had) signed up for, is to travel to the Bulgarian embassy in London (would cost more than £50 on the train) to get a letter stamped officially, and then to send it to Bulgaria for her niece to hand over in time for the one month notice to end the contract (if we miss this date - in early December - then a further 12 month contract will apparently kick in).
This seems like nonsense to me, but my Bulgarian language isn't good enough to make too many meaningful enquiries myself into the regulations on this, so I'm hoping someone here might be able to advise. I suggested getting someone to pretend to go into the Vivacom shop pretending to be her, but apparently they check ID cards. I've asked her to ring the Vivacom head office to explain the situation and plead for some common sense, but she's not having much joy with the people she's spoken to so far.
Anyone any ideas?