I had an Airtel post-paid mobile connection in Bangalore. Since I moved of Bangalore, I decided to terminate my connection. This includes de-activating my number and cancelling the authorised direct debit from Citibank credit card. I got on line with a customer service agent and cancelled the connection. I was told that everything will be settled correctly.
I believed that they will be doing their job sincerely since I did not have any unpleasant experiences with Airtel before. But then, four months later, when I happened to go through my credit card statement, I realised that they had been debiting money from it in the order of INR 1500.00 every month. I immediately called up the customer care regarding this and told them the situation. They took time and told me that they neither had any information on when my number was cancelled nor any information about my number in their database. Every customer service agent I spoke to gave the same response. So I escalated the issue to a Lead, and then a Manager. Since none of them were to offer me an explanation, they once again escalated it to Nodal Officers (Divyashree Towers, Bannerghatta Road, Bangalore). These nodal officers are supposed to resolve issues much faster than their counter teams. They said they will look into it and get back to me in a week. In the mean time, I called up Citibank to terminate all direct debits on my credit card in a hope that no further direct debit will be made. But to my disappointment, the Citibank customer service told me that they have no such options to cancel direct debits and it is up to Airtel to cancel it. At this point I should say that Citibank is a useless bank that offers to no protection to its customers against such misuse of the cards.
After a week, I decided to call up the nodal officers in Bangalore and they still hadn't done anything about it. After this call, I called them every three days to know of the progress. I was so frustrated by what they were doing to their customers. This went on for about 3 more months.By this time, I almost lost INR 8000 on my credit card. At one point, they started terminating my calls, the moment they realised they were speaking to me. Now, I am planning to sue Airtel for fraudulent use of my credit card and Citibank for not offering any sort of protection to its customers despite bringing it their attention.
Please avoid using Airtel if you do not want to be cheated like this. It is high time you start taking a look at your credit card bills.
Vivek
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