A businessman came to me with a box of bills which he has kept since 2005 as proof of how he was scammed by a legal service provider! He had paid more than RM4,000 unknowingly for SMS he received which he did not subscribe to in the first place.
Mr. Tan said the SMS were from companies which deal in offers including football matches, marketing products and some lewd ones on massage services.Tan travel frequently overseas for business and thought that the high bill was due to the raoaming service. After a month of staying put in Kuching, he was amazed at how high the bill was. A check through his itemised bill showed that out of the RM469 paid, RM257 went to the SMS external provider charges.
I called that daylight robbery. Tan went to the DIGI service provider to lodge a complaint and as usual, he was pushed from one branch to another. However, he was persistance and got an agreement that the SMS would stop. Tan was told that each SMS cost between 30 cents to RM5 and even if anyone were to delete the SMS without reading, they are still paying money to the company, the external provider.
Such pratice is not only peculiar with DIGI, but all mobile phone services. I think it is high time the government introduced an anti-scam law like those in Australia, China and United States.
We are always taken for a ride for all sort of scam and this one is worst as the government is allowing it to happen right under their nose. The service provider should take responsibility for the whole scam. They should have blocked the SMS from going out if they were serious in curbing such scam. I wondered if they were getting some kind of commission out of the whole thing.
Mr. Tan said while talking to a staff at DIGI, one supervisor even offered to pay RM100 as compensation to him. The amount is too little compared to the amount already forked out by him in the last few years.
MCMC should do something about it before more people are conned. Imagine the number of 29.62 millions mobile phone users in the country. If each company can collect RM10 a day, the amount collected each day would be 296.20 million ringgit. And for whose benefit, the poor common people? Or the rich cheating on the poor?
1 comment:
I am sure the service provider like Digi are also making a quick kill because any sms sending via their framework will have to pay them. Imagine if they collect about 15-20 cts per sms. This Service provider are actually in cahoots with the scammers. Can't the government do anything about this.
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