Dear Sir / Madam,

I recently received a letter from M/s. Vijai Associates Advocates, Chennai, who claim to represent M/s. Bharti Airtel Limited, Chennai (hereinafter referred to as “BAL”).

a) The said notice alleges that I have expressly agreed to pay regularly, without default for the usage and services of the mobile number rented from Bharti
b) The said notice, alleges that I have committed breach of agreement.
c) The said notice alleges that I have knowingly and with an intention to defraud their client, wilfully misused the connection provided by BAL, for my wrongful gain, which is a punishable criminal offence under the IPC.
d) The said notice alleges that my evading the payment of the outstanding of Rs.3406/-, reveals my dishonest intention to cause wrongful loss to BAL.
e) I have been called upon by the advocate to pay the outstanding before 27- Jun-09.

The said notice bearing the letter reference no. TN / 1567 is dated 12-05-09. However I have received the said letter notice, only on 22-6-09 (as also evidenced by the postal date stamp).

I wish to request that your Organisation kindly help me, in tackling this menace and harassment, meted out by BAL. In the process, I also wish to bring to your kind notice that this phone was being used by my wife also, for her business. This has resulted in business loss to her due to the lack of receipt of timely communication regarding business transactions.

We i.e. me and my wife, had informed the agent of M/s. BAL, in Coimbatore, that we wished to changeover to prepaid, from post-paid because of the bogus billing being done by BAL, under the post-paid scheme. We were told to make the payment of the outstanding due. Here again we were certain that we were being overbilled. However, to get rid of this headache, we took the easier way out and paid the entire due (i.e. billed and unbilled), until the day of the conversion i.e. 19-Sep-08. Based on this, we were given the pre-paid SIM card too, with the same mobile number. From 19-Sep-08 to 24-Sep-08, I did not use the phone, because i took out the post-paid SIM card and replaced it with the pre-paid SIM card, so that I could begin to use it. However, nothing happened. So, we got in touch with the authorised dealer, regarding this problem. He gave us the contact number of the concerned BAL entity. On communicating our problem (that despite the time period of 9 hours for activation, nothing had happened until the 24’th) we were shunted around by BAL, every time we called them. We had to keep repeating our problem to every tom, dick and mary repeatedly (and also put on hold endlessly), without no avail. This can be proved, from the call centre recordings of the conversation between us and BAL call centre employees. Finally, on 25th Sep 2008, we again replaced our new pre-paid with the old post-paid connection, which was still active. We had no other alternative. However, we used it for receiving incoming calls and for making half a dozen local calls of short duration i.e. less than 3 minutes. We did not make any calls from this phone number except for these calls, in the month of September and October.

In the period subsequent to 24-Sep-09, we kept contacting the BAL call centre, but no proper information was given to us. They simply got our phone number and said that they would get in touch with us or will sort out the problem. Our copies of the correspondence with BAL are as below.

Dear Customer,

Thank you for contacting Nodal Officer Desk at Airtel. We are in receipt of
your query/complaint and will get back shortly

regards

Nodal Officer
Disclaimer: Kindly note that the working hours for Nodal is from Monday to
Friday between 9:30 am to 6:30 pm.

from 121@airtelindia.com <121@airtelindia.com>
reply-to 121@airtelindia.com
to kbsarans@gmail.com
date Tue, Oct 7, 2008 at 4:16 PM
subject Re: Complaint – inaction [REF:202292572886]

hide details 10/7/08

Reply

Follow up message
Dear Mr. Bindusaran,

Thank you for contacting Airtel.

You had expressed concern over the delay in the postpaid to prepaid migration of your mobile number 9994966339.

We understand your concern and will work towards resolving the same.

We would like to confirm that your number was not migrated to prepaid as there is billed and unbilled amount pending in your account. Hence, we kindly request you to clear the billed and unbilled amount and revert to us to initiate further action.

Please be informed that your billed amount due is Rs. 229.12-/ and to know your current unbilled amount, kindly dial *121*12# (toll free) from your mobile.

Kindly be informed that we have arranged for the detailed bill for the invoice dated 24/09/08, 24/08/08 and Service Request number for the same is 18693532.

You would receive the bill on or before 16/10/08.

You can also logon to our website www.airtel.in

to view the last 4 invoices with Itemized statement at free of cost after 2 days from the bill generation date. You can find the below steps to view your bill details:

New User:

? Logon to our website, www.airtel.in

? Click on register and register your account by filling the form online.
? A message would be sent on your mobile informing about the user name and the password and just update the given username and the password after login to our website and you would be able to view your mobile account details.

1. Logon to our website, www.airtel.in

2. Please login with the username and the password and you would be able to view your Mobile account details.
3. Click “Bill Guide” option in the left side of the webpage.
4. Click ?Account number?
5. Select the invoice period to view the details and click on “Bill details”
6. Click on “Itemized Call Statement” to view the itemized call details.

It has always been our endeavor to provide you with the best customer service and we assure you of our sincere commitment to meet all your future requirements.

For further assistance, mail us at 121@airtelindia.com.

We value your association with Airtel.

Warm Regards,

Prajesh
Customer Care Executive
Bharti Airtel Limited.

“Saran KB”
06-10-2008 04:30 PM
To
nodalofficer.tn

@airtel.in

cc

Subject
Complaint – inaction

Dear Whoever is in charge,

I have been ur customer, for quite some time now. Generally, your service is good, but there are certain issues which get a customer’s goat. Let me explain.
I possess a post paid connection 9994966339. I had applied for and got this converted to a prepaid service. The SIM was given to me , with the same number. I also received a SMS informing that the conversion would be activated in 9 hours. This was on the 19’th of September’08. Till now, no conversion has taken place. Meanwhile, i did not use my mobile from the 19’th to the 24’th because i was told that it would be billed. I had also paid my existing dues before getting the prepaid SIM. In between the Executive from your company called up and asked about the problem. Nothing has happened. A bill has been forwarded to me, for Rs.200/- odd for the period of last month.

Does’nt your organisation understand that the reason for convertin to the pre-paid one is purely because of your dubious billing for the post-paid service. I now request you to kindly send me an itemised billing for the last two months upto date. I wish to compare your itemised billing. In the meantime, an explanation as to why your company does not want to allow its customers to migrate to the prepaid service, despite communication by the customer, would also be appreciated for any further course of action. Moreover, your Customer Service helpline has not communicated the docket number assigned to my complaint, instead the concerned call centre employee put my call on hold for more than 3-5 minutes, saying that she was transferring my call to her superior. The followup person, who called me after a week, wanted to know the serial number of the SIM card assigned to me for the converted pre-paid number.

I propose to take up this issue seriously, in the span of a week’s time. I hope to receive a proper response from your end since i have been put to a lot of inconvenience, by your inefficiency. A mere sorry does not help in any way, after the damage is done.

From
K.bindusaran

From the above it is clear that BAL dealer could not have given us the SIM (against BAL’s policy) or agreed to enable the activation of our new pre-paid number, without our having cleared all the dues, until the point of physically being given the SIM card by the BAL dealer. This clearly gives the lie to BAL’s claim that Rs.212/- was due from us.

We had wanted to convert from the post-paid scheme to the pre-paid scheme, because of the dubious billing by BAL, in the past. The bill elements that indicated the local calls, national calls and sms were not in keeping with our actual usage (as evidenced from our mobile phones storage / memory facility). It is also important to note that, from a dubious outstanding of Rs.212 i.e. from 19-September ’08, the outstanding became Rs. 3046/- in 2009!. This is to be considered from the fact that, we have been using the said number for receiving incoming calls and hardly a few outgoing local calls, only until november’09.

Therefore it is apparent that BAL are perpetrating a national level fraud on unsuspecting consumers, by tweaking the duration of calls and by populating the bill with often called numbers. They discourage the conversion of post-paid consumers to pre-paid scheme, as it will involve huge losses for them, by way of being unable to manipulate the bills/ call duration. This calls for a national level investigation too.

They have sent their collection agent to our residence, at odd times, to press for the “dues”.

In the meanwhile, we request your advice, on how to proceed further, in this case.

Regards
Mr. & Mrs. Bindusaran