A few months ago, I acquired a pre-paid mobile account from Airtel, the largest mobile operator in India with 210 million customers. I'd used Airtel before, with mixed results, but using post-paid accounts. On the mobile account, I had no problems to speak of. On my data plan, they continued to bill me for a month after I had terminated it. Terminated it clearly, to the point where one of their reps called me to try to persuade me to keep it. I told him I was exiting the country, and he was trying to talk me into a reduced data plan(I had an unlimited plan at a claimed 256 kbps, with actual speeds of 30-40 kbps). I had the devil of a time getting him to understand that a data plan in India did me no good when I was living on the other side of the world. I got gypped out of Rs.1100($22) for the next month, which came out of my deposit. Moral of the story: never let Airtel keep any more of your cash than you absolutely have to. They will find a way to steal it.
So I get this pre-paid mobile account, and load it up with a goodish amount, since I intended to use it quite a bit. My usage is strictly voice, no data and no outgoing text messaging. I thought that with a pre-paid plan, when it came time to leave, I didn't need to hassle with their customer "care" people. But I hadn't reckoned with Airtel's usual practice with pre-paid accounts. A couple of weeks after I got it, I received a text message which said something to the effect of "Thank you for using XYZ service. Rs. 5 has been deducted from your account". Never having encountered this before, I put it down to some error, or perhaps some errant message intended for someone else. And it was only Rs. 5(10 cents), so I wasn't too perturbed. The next day, I get the same thing, and then the day after. I called up "customer care", and they insisted I had subscribed to a "value-added service". I told them I use the phone for nothing else but voice, and that the day I got the first message, the phone had been sitting quietly in front of me on the desk for several hours. I hadn't so much as picked it up in my hand, and(I told them) I don't subscribe to anything. After some back and forth, they told me I needed to "unsubscribe". I said, why would I need to unsubscribe when I never subscribed in the first place? What I needed for them to do was rectify their error. Finally, after conferring with a couple other people, the guy told me he had unsubscribed me, but it could take a couple of days to take effect. In reply to my question about the money deducted, he said he couldn't make a refund. I was told that I could request an itemized bill via e-mail, but what they didn't tell me was that my account would be debited an additional Rs. 50, just for the privilege of knowing when and for how much Airtel had ripped me off. At this point, they had taken out about Rs. 120. So I said(to myself), "(Expletive) it, I'm not going to chase after $2". It took 2 more days, and another Rs. 10 deducted, before I was "unsubscribed".
A week goes by, and I get another text message thanking me for subscribing to some sort of movie trivia service, and again takes 5 bucks out. This time, I called right away. The customer "care" people did anything but care, but I finally got them to "unsubscribe" me, without a refund, of course. At this point, I was wondering how much Airtel might be making from this scam, and how many people they do it to. I began researching complaints on the web, and found out that Airtel has been doing this since at least 2007-and possibly since 1995(the year it was founded)- and has generated a massive flood of complaints. TRAI(the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) has totally ignored the fraud up until the present day. Not surprising, since the Mittals, who founded and own a large chunk of Bharti Airtel, are dollar billionaires(#113 on the Forbes 400 list), icons of the rising India, and politically extremely well-connected indeed. I find that Airtel has 210 million customers, with about 10 million of them being post-paid accounts. Based on my experience, and the complaints I read, I estimated that on any given day, Airtel was ripping off a minimum of 5-7% of its pre-paid customers, or between 10 and 14 million. It was(and is) harder to estimate the average amount of the ripoff, since Airtel has a variety of "value-added" scams going on. On the low-end, it is 2-5 Rs., and it could be as much as 30 Rs. a day. So I think a figure of Rs.8 on average is reasonable, especially given that I have been generous in my low assessment of 5-7% victims, since many of them are ripped off for days before the hemorrhaging stops. So, at Rs. 8 per day for, let's say, 12 million customers, Airtel garners Rs. 96 million a day, or Rs. 35,000 million a year, which is about $700 million. That represents a very, very healthy 45% of the Rs. 76,782 million($1.5 billion) profit before tax that Airtel reported for 2010-11. In short, 45% of Airtel's profits before tax are stolen from their pre-paid customers without their knowledge or approval. Or, to put it another way, Airtel paid their taxes of Rs. 16.7 billion with stolen money, and got an extra Rs. 18 billion in pure play-money, just from pre-paid accounts. They presumably wrangle another couple of bucks out of their post-paid, landline and internet customers. This has been going on for years, and my very conservative estimate is that it totals well over $2 billion. Not chump change, by any yardstick.
So a few weeks go by, and I get comfortable, thinking I'm not on Airtel's scamming radar anymore. Then, I get hit again, this time for something called "VOV", hitting me up for Rs.5 per day again. This time, I "unsubscribed" over their website, without a refund, of course. Now, I'm getting really mad, and I decide that the next time I get one of these things, I'm going over to the Airtel office(the main one), and demand to be allowed to pick the pocket of whichever executive I see. I mean, fair's fair, right? Airtel is reaching into my (virtual) wallet and helping itself to cash, so I don't see why I shouldn't be able to do the same thing to their people. I would love to do it to Sunil Mittal himself, but I wouldn't be able to get within a mile of him. It doesn't matter how little the amount is for me, it's the principle of the thing, and the feeling of being violated. Again, about 3 weeks after the VOV heist, Airtel hits me again, this time for "KANNADA MOV MMS_2". I don't know what this is about, except that it seems to involve Kannada movies. I am not a fan of Kannada movies, or of Indian movies in general- which seem unable to get out of the song-and-dance/drama/violence/pathos/silly-comedy combination routine that has marked the Indian movie industry for at least 80 years- and I am now thoroughly p.o.'d. Okay, crunch time, Airtel! I'm coming to pick your pockets!
Update: I got Airtel to permanently take my number off their "Value Added Services", and I haven't been hit again in the past 6 months or so. If you have been hit with the same issue, I suggest you visit their regional office, and firmly ask to pick their pockets as a quid pro quo. In the meanwhile, my housekeeper- who laughed at me everytime I threw a fit(she's not very up on my slang, but she gets the gist!) when Airtel "enrolled" me in a new scam and said it never happens to her- asked me to download some of my music onto her cellphone. While I was doing that, I also updated her phone software, and while I was explaining to her how the new-look interface worked, I noticed she had a couple of notifications from Airtel similar to what I'd been getting, but for less, like 1 to 1.5 rupees a day. She admitted she'd been getting this for months, but hadn't understood what it was and would promptly delete the message. She apparently hadn't noticed that her balance was going down by that amount every day from this deduction, putting it down to her usage instead. I'm sure Airtel has tens of millions of similarly challenged users, and it's like taking candy from a baby when they scam a dollar a month off each of these millions of users. I've told her what to do about it, and hopefully she will follow up.
Update: I just found this post, which details Airtel's latest moneymaker:
http://ajithprasad.com/airtel-smartbytes-scam/
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