| Address: Chennai, Tamil Nadu |
I purchased a new Aircel connection that comes bundled with some free internet usage to try out their network. I topped up the account by Rs.50 and added an SMS Rate Cutter pack for Rs.55. My balance as on March 5, 2013 was about Rs.47.
On March 6, 2013, my phone did a reboot and on turning it back on, I received a message that the cost of the last message was Rs.5 and my current balance showed up as Rs.27.
When I called customer care to inform this and request a refund, I was brusquely by some lady informed a VAS service was activated and they can't do anything about it. She offered to deactivate it and immediately disconnected before I could determine how the "service" was activated.
I called "customer care" again and was informed no such thing was activated, to my astonishment. I was requested to confirm by calling 500010 which I did and found nothing was activated.
So I called "customer care" again and after explaining the issue, was told to hold on the line - which disconnected of course.
And I called "customer care" yet again and was informed it I was sent an SMS from Aircel which would activate the service unless I sent "NO" to not activate it. I did not receive this SMS and this sounds like some unfair malpractice if they can activate "services" like this at their whims and fancy. Easy way for them to cheat customers out of their money. On informing this, the lady immediately disconnected before I could question how they could activate something without my permission.
After this, my calls to "customer care" were not attended by those irresponsible agents who had probably red-listed my number. I waited without disconnecting for 13 minutes after which the call disconnected by itself. Same case for the next two times.
In short, I would like to warn you all that Aircel activates services without permission and expects you to find it out by yourself. They don't refund the money either and if you question them, they block your calls. If my phone had not rebooted, I wouldn't have discovered this issue until after my balance reached Zero - which is what they are hoping will happen to their customers. This company doesn't seem to be interested in a long term customer relationship and wants to simply grab what little it makes in as short a time as possible.
I doubt our beloved Consumer Courts and TRAI will address this issue as it looks like the Government is only interested in extorting our money, placing ridiculous constraints on our communication capabilities, raising prices and creating a bad standard of life in general.
I am cutting up this sim and throwing it away right now.
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