I am a very loyal Airtel Customer for the last 7-8 years.

I use their mobile connections, DSLs, and Telephone lines. All put together my monthly billing with Airtel is around Rs.10000-12000.

Being a business owner I travel overseas pretty often. Everytime I activate International Roaming with Data barred and have not had an issue with their billing. My monthly cellphone bill is always under Rs.2000.

I travelled to Dubai, UAE from Oct 1 - Oct 19th, 2011 and when I received my bill on 21st October, I was shocked to see that the total charges were around Rs.5000. I was 100% sure that this was not possible since I keep a track of ALL calls received and made on International Roaming.

I very categorically remembered that I had made just 2 calls (one local with Dubai and one to my father in India). I had received 2 calls. Unfortunately, oth of them were wrong numbers .

So I filed a complaint with Airtel. The complaint number was 40330739 and I was promised a resolution by the coming Tuesday. On Monday evening I received a call from an Airtel executive asking about my issue. And to my surprise his first question was

"Sir, aap kitna pay karna chahte hain." As if they are trying to do a settlement. I told him very clearly that I will surely pay for all the calls that I have made and received irrespective of their amounts. But I will not pay a cent for anything which I have not done. So the question of settlement does not arise. To this he said that he would then need to talk his "seniors" on the issue and revert back to me. After that there was no call. I received 2 SMS alerts mentioning that Airtel was trying to call me from a particular number and that they would call back again. I tried calling back the number that was given in the SMS but it seemed to be call out number only.

After a few days I called up Customer Service to enquire about the status and to my surprise the case was closed as all call charges were found to be valid and since I was not contactable.

As can be seen from the attached call log (actual number hidden due to privacy concerns), calls received from 112 are all crap. What kind of a number is 112. The outgoing call log also indicates calls made to 9810098200, which is the number for retrieving voice mails. FIrst, nobody's a fool to retrieve voice mails when on International Roaming. Secondly, if at all I were to call voice mail service the call would surely last longer than shown in the call log. I won't be calling for 5 seconds and then dialling again after a few seconds for 5 seconds.

All this surely seems to be an error in billing and that is being covered up by saying that all charges are valid and that I am not contactable.

So my sincere suggestion to all Airtel Users. DO NOT USE AIRTEL CELLPHONES ON INTERNATIONAL ROAMING. ITS A BLOODY RIPOFF.