Hello Sir/ Madam,

I am Thiruvenkatam.S from Bangalore. I am facing a major problem from Airtel. My Post paid mobile no is 98455 44894. The issue in brief is as follows:

I am a Customer of Airtel post paid connection from the past 10 years plus and my monthly billing plan is "Future lite 199" and my average Airtel bill has been around Rs 250/ month. By around 15th / 20th of November 2011 i purchased a smart phone and inserted my existing Airtel Sim card. Immediately the GPRS connectivity (EDGE) services got activated. Now the Phone i purchased was preloaded with many applications which start using the GPRS facility immediately. I was ignorant of all this activity and the charges for the facility. In total my usage (download as per the bill has been 556 Kbytes as per the Airtel where as my handset shows an usage of 346 Kbytes as download usage.

When i received the Bill i was shocked to see a bill amount of Rs 4889/-. I immediately called the customer care and instructed him to deactivate my GPRS facility first and then asked him about the huge bill for which I was told me that even though my usage has been less since i did not choose any GPRS package like the Rs 98/- package with a 1 Gb free download or the Rs 149/- package with 2 Gb download I have been put on the open usage category and so the high bill. I immediately asked him why in the first place GPRS was activated on my number and why nobody called me to intimate me about the services / packages and related cost. For this he had no proper answer and he said that by default GPRS is activated for all existing old customers. I further requested him to rework on the bill and give me a coorect bill as my useage has not even crossed the free download permitted on the Rs 98/- package which is 1 Gb against my usage of 556 Kb as per their bill.

For which he asked me to send a mail to the customer care which I promptly did. After 3-4 days I get a mail saying the customer care mail id has been changed and so I need to resend the mail to the new id, which was also done. From then onwards I have getting calls till date from the collection department asking for the payment but nobody from the customer care has bothered to call me to sort out this problem.

After nearly a month of continuous correspondence from my side by mail to the customer care one fine day they have sent me a mail which has added fuel to the fire.

ONE CUSTOMERCARE LADY QUOTES THAT SHE HAS VERIFIED WITH THE PARTICULAR DEPARTMENT (GPRS DEPT) FOR WHICH THEY SAY THEY HAVE TAKEN MY PERMISSION REGARDING THE PACKAGES ON OFFER AND THE CHARGES. SO I AM LIABLE TO PAY THE FULL AMOUNT.

I HAVE REPLIED BACK TO THE MAIL STATING THAT THE BE PREPARED TO SUBSTANTIATE WHAT THEY HAVE SAID BECAUSE THIS IS A UTTER LIE AND THEY ARE ANSWERABLE FOR COMMUNICATING SUCH A BLATANT LIE.

From then on I have not received any further mails or communication from the customer care team. I am now getting pestered by the collection team asking for payments.

Please guide me as I would like to take legal action against AIRTEL for charging such huge undue charges and making innocent people’s life miserable and on top of that they are harassing people for wrong payments. I have saved all the mail communications that I have had with them.

Warm regards

Thiruvenkatam.S
Bangalore.
Mob: 98455 44894