Airtel (Prepaid Mobile phone services in Bangalore)
Fradulent charges to my account

1. On Sept 2 my prepaid mobile phone account was charged Rs 35 for Hello Tunes, though I had not made any request for any such thing. I got an SMS saying "Thank you for choosing Hello Tunes. You have been charged Rs 35/- for month". I wasted a lot of time getting an operator on "Customer Care Number" 121 to complain to and then to get his supervisor and finally to get the charge reversed.

2. On Sept 6 history repeated itself, with my receiving an SMS saying "Thank you. Please dial 55223 to listen live Aarti from Tirupati Balaji temple. You have been charged Rs 10/- for seven days with 100 minutes of usage". Again I wasted a lot of my time getting this charge reversed. I asked the call center supervisor how he can prevent such fraudulent charging in future. He did not seem to understand what I was saying and repeated himself without answering my question. However, he agreed to escalate the matter to his superior.

3. Again on Sept 9 I received an SMS identical in content and Rs 10/- has been charged to my account once more.

4. We have all been reading that "value added services" is a profitable business for telecom companies. However, it is easy to recognize that fraud can be even more profitable!

5. I don't know how many millions are getting cheated by such unauthorized debits. TRAI should require a database of SMS requests for service requests to be maintained before debits are allowed. A penalty of Rs 10 crores should be levied from Airtel to discourage this pernicious practice.

Company: Airtel (Prepaid Mobile phone services in Bangalore)
Country: India
State: Karnataka

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