Airtel prepaid mobile service fraud

This one is a rant about pathetic service that I am getting from my mobile service provider.

For last several months, i.e. June to be precise, Airtel is sending unsolicited SMS disguised as a VAS (value added service) to my mobile and debiting my account Rs 3/- for each such SMS. The SMS comes from 290603 with such enchanting subjects like Tip Of the Day and Love Tip of The Day.

By now they have emptied all my prepaid balance and it has turned negative Rs (-) 30/- . I am denied to make any outside call or send sms due to this!! As per the law of the land no service provider can charge for VAS unless customer has explicitly subscribed it.

Apparently, I am not the first or last victim. There are many like me here, here and here. Just google airtel 290603 sms, there are hundreds of other hapless customers getting robbed like this. This is clearly helping them to swell the revenue at the cost of customers' hard earned money.

Their customer service helpline (121) is always busy. If you are fortunate enough to go beyond the call queue, you will find no menu to reach their phone officers to complain about this while countless emails to 121@airtel are auto acknowledged back with a standard reply- we are looking into this.

While I am taking this matter to the appropriate authorities, wanted this post to alert the users (and prospective customers) of Airtel's service about their fraudulent ways of fleecing money.
Check your (dwindling) prepaid balance- is it vanishing mysteriously?

My next phone will not be a Nokia

I have formed this opinion after my latest experience with Nokia phone and their customer service. Before this experience I had been a great fan of Nokia for over a decade . I have owned one of the first models (5110) they launched in India back in 1998. Call rates then were as high as Rs 9/- per minute for out going and Rs 6/- per minute for incoming on BPL Mobile, Mumbai. Over the years I bought and owned several other Nokia models like 3130, 3610, N72 etc and had a pleasant experience with all of them.

My latest phone is a Nokia e61i. I was gifted this phone by wifey last Diwali. We bought this phone from Croma @ Hadapsar. It was working fine until sometime last month when I noticed its keypad back-light was not working even in a dark room. I know e61i has a "light sensitive" back-light and it would light up only when needed.

Not sure when and how did it stop working as I do not use phones in the dark very often. Anyways since, phone was still under warranty I thought it prudent to show it to a NokiaCare. I took the phone to Akshay Telecom on F C Road. They examined the phone and said it was due to water seepage and will not be done under warranty. I was shocked. The phone was never ever mishandled, dropped or drenched in my possession and is working absolutely fine otherwise. Probably it is just a manufacturing defect which I failed to notice sooner. As a pricey gift and some emotional attachment to it, I agreed to bear the cost of repairing and left the phone with them. They promised to come back to me in three to four days.

Days passed but they never called back or bothered to answer my phone calls. In between I made four visits to their center- always crowded and people huddling to get an attention from dorky attendants. The volume of crowd tells the quality of phones that Nokia is churning out these days. Every time I went I had to wait for at least half an hour to get my turn. They would say they are still "looking into" it. Fed up with their unprofessional ways and after so many days without my primary phone, at last, I decided to take back the phone. They returned it un-repaired still they billed me Rs 112/- as "testing charges". After this, I followed up with couple of emails and calls to NokiaCare directly. None of these helped. They just defended the action of their care center instead of advising me how to get the issue resolved.

My phone remains un-repaired, working w/o back-light. NokiaCare says it will not be fixed under warranty or otherwise as it is "water-logged". They know, after so many months it is difficult for me to prove that I am not responsible for "water-logging" or whatever and it is a genuine manufacturing defect. It does not hurt them. It hurts me. For no fault of mine I would have to live with an ailing phone for which I spent my hard earned 17k. It hurts more when it is from such a reliable and a big brand like Nokia.

I do not know why Nokia has such a ridiculous warranty and customer support policy in India! When the hard-disk on my four years old PC conked off Seagate immediately replaced it with a new one without asking any question.

Nokia are you listening?

You have just lost a loyal customer. I am not surprised by your concerns of loosing market share !

Helpdesk at Icici Direct

My other half has a trading a/c with the ICICI Direct but it is only me who runs it and knows the portfolio's worth :-). Lately, I have observed a lot of descripancies in the online MF portfolio tracker at their site. It is reporting few fund holdings twice. This inflates our net worth but, it is of no use as I can not sell them. For selling I need to use the unit holdings page and sadly, the data is accurate here.

I reported this matter to ICICIDirect through following email:

Ref: Trading a/c # XXX
Demat a/c # XXX

Hi,

My mutual fund portfolio tracker page ( trading -> portfolio -> mutual funds) is showing wrong data. Some funds are getting reported twice causing wrong portfolio value. Some funds like:

SBI FUNDS MANAGEMENT PVT LTD SBI MAGNUM COMMA FUND - GROWTH OPTION
and
TATA MUTUAL FUND TATA INFRASTRUCTURE FUND - GROWTH

are reported twice on the page each time under different Fund "Category". I have noticed this problem ever since you have implemented new SIP investment options. Looks like your coders have done a shoddy job and QA has failed to notice it.

This is causing a great inconvenience to me by reporting inflated portfolio value. Pls check and correct the bug as early as possible.

Thanks,
xxx

After two days this is the reply I received from their CSA:

Dear Ms. Jha,

We wish you a Happy New Year!

If you wish to delete any transaction from your Mutual Fund Portfolio, we request you to follow the below mentioned procedure:

1. Login to www.icicidirect.com

2. Go to portfolio section on the trading page

3. click on the Mutual Funds link

4. Click on the Scheme name of the Mutual Fund which you wish to delete.

5. Click on the "x" symbol available on the extreme right side to delete that particular transaction.

Sincerely,

XXX

Customer Service Officer

ICICI Bank Limited

Note the signing authority and her designation..."ICICI Bank".

This is my follow-up reply and I am waiting to hear on this :

> If you wish to delete any transaction from your Mutual Fund Portfolio, we
> request you to follow the below mentioned procedure:
>
> 1. Login to www.icicidirect.com
> 2. Go to portfolio section on the trading page

Did you understand the issue I have reported? I think it is a totally irrelevant and dumb reply I got from ICICI Direct. Let me try to explain the problem once again.

Say I have a mutual fund called MF1 and I have 100 units of MF1 in my DEMAT account. The portfolio tracker page reports MF1 twice as:

serial# 1 MF1 - units held =100
serial# 2 MF1 - units held = 100

Since, I am NOT adding any transaction MANUALLY into my mutual fund portfolio tracker, it must be coming through the software that ICICI Direct uses. Right!

Another thing is that I have subscribed for SIP, hence MF1 can have 100s of SIP transactions all accumulated under SL#1 and SL#2. Do you expect me to delete each SIP transactions one-by-one through your portfolio tracker? Can you imagine the time it will take to do that?

Another thing, if I delete MF1 at SL#2 what is the guarantee that SL#1 would not get deleted also and I will loose all my portfolio information!!! I suspect both SL #1 and SL #2 to share the same PK in the back end database if your DB is in third normal form (?)

I appreciate that you may not follow all the issues that I have raised here, hence, please escalate it to your Technical Architect or SQA Lead- I am sure he will understand the problem and please do not waste my time (and yours too) by copy-pasting a "set" response from your
repository of replies!

Please...my time is very precious...

Thanks for taking time to reply.

- xxx

It is getting increasingly difficult to get an accurate response from ICICI Direct for any query... but ... what are my options? I have heard more annoying tales about the competition from my friends. Unfortunately most CSA activities are either out- sourced or are manned by less than adequately trained personnel who are quite incompetent to address such queries :-( and what is alarming is such dorky CSAs are polluting the name of ICICI Bank as well by signing under their banner. I think ICICI management should separate the CSA's of ICICI Bank and ICICI Direct- at least that will help them to preserve some respect in ICICI Bank that I want to have!

Loosing patience!

I have not received my renewed passport yet and it does not look to be happening in a near future either. For past three weeks, I see the same poster: "It is to regret that due to unavoidable circumstances the despatch of Passport has been delayed and will now be despatched in a week's time". Mails to rpo DOT pune AT mea DOT gov DOT in are not answered !!

Anyone (other than me) stuck at the same damn status?

:-(

Patience Pays

Once again I checked the status today. But, unlike last time now it says:

"Police Report is clear and the passport is expected to be despatched by 18-02-2006 Subject to all documents being in order."

I have not paid any bribe to get it cleared. Which makes me believe that our government agencies can really work. What you need is an 'honest' patience to wait (I have waited for over ten weeks now) for the results to happen naturally. Most often it is only us, who try to catalyze the process by greasing with bribes, in order to 'accelerate' results.

Hope my trust in the system is not betrayed.