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Business News›News›Trending›Foldable phone developed a black line along the crease within a year, company denied warranty, asked Rs 1.3 lakh to fix it; consumer court orders Google to pay Rs 1.1 lakh

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Foldable phone developed a black line along the crease within a year, company denied warranty, asked Rs 1.3 lakh to fix it; consumer court orders Google to pay Rs 1.1 lakh
Synopsis

A Kasaragod district consumer commission has ordered Google to refund the full price of a customer's foldable phone after the company denied a warranty claim and instead quoted a repair bill nearly three times the phone's cost. The commission held that Google's conduct amounted to deficiency in service and directed the company to pay over Rs 1.1 lakh in total.

A district consumer commission in Kasaragod has ordered Google to refund the entire amount a man paid for his foldable phone, months after the company denied his warranty claim and instead asked him to pay a repair charge nearly three times the price of the device.



The commission ruled that Google had first accepted the warranty claim and then reversed its own decision, blaming the fault on minor external scratches that had no connection to the actual defect. It called this deficiency in service and directed the company to pay a total of over Rs 1.1 lakh to the complainant.



What went wrong with the phone

According to the complainant, he had bought the foldable phone for Rs 88,331 in May 2025. The device was mostly used by his wife for her work at a company based in Bangalore. Around seven months later, the phone developed a black line along the crease of its inner screen, and a battery symbol appeared that pointed to a fault in the motherboard, the complainant said. He noted that the outer body of the phone had only minor scratches from regular daily use, which he said had nothing to do with the internal fault.



Warranty approved, then denied

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The complainant said he raised a warranty claim soon after the fault appeared, and Google's support team initially confirmed that the phone was eligible for a free replacement. But once the company's service partner picked up the device for inspection, Google reversed that decision. It cited the cosmetic scratches on the phone's body as the reason for denying the claim, even though the complainant maintained these scratches had no technical link to the screen or motherboard issue.

A few days later, Google sent the complainant a repair estimate of Rs 1,31,899, close to three times what he had originally paid for the phone. He refused to pay this amount. When the device was eventually returned to him, it had stopped working altogether, having gone from a partial screen fault to complete motherboard failure while in the company's custody, the complainant said.

Complaint to the consumer helpline and commission



Frustrated by the response, the complainant filed a grievance with the National Consumer Helpline. Despite the helpline issuing formal notices and multiple reminders to Google, the company did not respond, according to the order. He then approached the District Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission in Kasaragod, seeking a refund or replacement of the phone along with compensation for the mental agony and professional disruption he said the episode had caused his wife.



Google was served notice of the case but did not appear before the commission, and was proceeded against ex-parte.



What the commission ordered



While deciding the case, the commission referred to an earlier ruling in a dispute involving Apple, where the company had been penalised for denying a valid warranty claim and shifting the blame to alleged unauthorised handling of the device. The commission held that arbitrarily denying a warranty obligation to extract charges from a customer amounts to deficiency in service, and applied the same reasoning to Google's conduct in this case.



The commission observed that a phone worth Rs 88,331 was not expected to develop such a serious fault within a few months of purchase, and that Google had failed to fix the defect even after taking the device back for inspection.



It directed Google to refund the purchase price of Rs 88,331 with 9 percent interest from December 27, 2025, the date the fault first appeared, till the amount is paid. The company was also ordered to pay Rs 20,000 as compensation for wrongly denying the warranty claim, along with Rs 3,000 as litigation cost. Google has been given 30 days from the date of the order to comply, failing which the amount will attract interest until it is paid in full.

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