Post an idiotic act exhibited by Airtel in activating my Broadband connection and the efforts that they had taken in realizing about the goof up done by their employees, I decided to dig into my post paid bill (Airtel Number +91-9880566xxx) details (expecting some smartness in my bills as well) which I have never done in the past 10 years of my connection history with Airtel. It was a shock that I received from my post paid bills!! I have detected volumes of money being swindled on missed call charges by Airtel against TRAI regulations. As I started to go through my own post paid bills for a couple of months to check an overcharge on data usage, where in addition to excess data charges (that are levied on me by INR 200 on the name of crossing the 2GB limits that I have subscribed – I strictly check webmail, without downloading anything, and no videos, movies etc), as an example, they have levied in excess of INR 800 (out of a bill of 3200/ this month) purely for missed calls!! I got shocked in seeing this manipulation of professional billing softwares to swindle money. For previous months also I have been seeing similar excess charges, the details of which I have given to the customer care. Surprisingly the person took the complaint himself was shocked in seeing my charges on missed calls and acted as if he was genuinely going to pursue the complaint and solve it for me! But till now, no resolution has been done. The complaint number with Airtel in this case is 1570960715. I may sound strange here, but I have really stopped trusting these Customer Care folks, having experienced their atrociously callous behavior towards complaints, as umpteen number of times I have placed on various other issues as well. Irrespective of my compliant gets solved or not, i request You to look into this, as this is a high volume scandal and against TRAI regulations I believe. I have also noticed this on pre-paid connections where it is very evident as the call charges are delivered instantly. I have very specifically observed this on several calls from one of my relatives, who has a pre-paid connection and We have seen this several times (as an experiment) as almost all unattended calls placed to my number get charged on this pre-paid number and instantly the minimum charge for a call gets cut! I request You to look into this matter as this is a serious finding and at least 20-30% of a persons calls in a month will be missed calls, imagine a situation where 10-20% (or at least 10%) of a major provider’s earnings being from missed calls, assuming they do this gimmick with everybody.I believe this has more depth than its seen from outside and has the potential of becoming a huge scam with volumes and multi millions of Rupees being swindled here over years. Best, +91-988056xxx Murali

I would want INR 2,000 to be compensated as charges paid in excess and a compensation of INR 1,00,000/ towards the mental agony and worries that this had caused to me and an assurance from Airtel that it wont repeat again along with an unconditional apology tendered to me from Airtel management, keeping the senior management involved so that even they are aware of the malpractices that happen in their own companies in the name of revenue generation

Email Id: chris.morley@rediffmail.