Bad experience with Telia Mobile

My wife, son and I traveled to the US from Latvia via London, where we spent the night at hotel near Paddington Station. While packing to leave, my wife apparently left behind a Samsung Duo phone with a Swedish Telia SIM card in it (for certain reasons, she often keeps the phone with a Latvian and Swedish Sim card in it). Fortunately, she had moved the Latvian LMT card to another phone.

Upon arrival in Boston on December 28, she discovered that her other phone was missing. First, we thought it had been stolen from her baggage. She tried repeatedly to reach Telia through its single customer service number and was either cut off or put into a seemingly endless phone queue paying international roaming rates on her LMT phone.

Then, a day later, while driving in Massachusetts, she got a call on her Latvian phone (she had tried calling the Swedish number to figure out what had happened) from a person at the hotel where she stayed who said she had found the phone. My wife still wanted to lock down her SIM card, just to be sure. It was only on December 31 that she got through to Telia and had the card shut down.

The scary part about this is that this is exactly the kind of worst-case scenario where you want a very fast way to secure your phone and SIM card -- the phone is lost in one country, the operator is in Sweden, and the phone owner is in yet another country. In this regard, Telia totally failed us, and my wife still doesn't know what happened with her SIM card over the three days before it was locked down. There should be some kind of secure, fast-track process for shutting down a SIM card, preferably on the internet.