Dear Mobile Users,

Airtel has caused consistent harassment to me in the past three months. I will start with the recent complaint and then talk about my earlier experiences. My number is +919007994159. It is a prepaid Kolkata number.

- Incident dated 12 Dec 2011

I took the Rs. 98 GPRS package from Airtel on 11 Oct 2011 after failing to get any form of 3G services even though I subscribed to a 200 MB 3G plan for a month. I still received only GPRS services and thus decided to change to GPRS exclusively. This package is on a auto-renewal scheme i.e. Airtel renews the plan unless you deactivate it.

On 00:14 Am on 12 Dec I recharged my phone for an amount of 333. Post that recharge, I had a balance of 400 plus rupees. I made an international call which would have cost me a maximum of 120 rupees. However, around 10 am when I looked at my balance it was only 20 odd rupees. I checked the date and remembered the 98 rupee recharge but this deduction was way more than the authorised deduction. I called Airtel 198 around 16 times, and most of the time my call was dropped on purpose. Only thrice there was any sort of a useful reply, one officer said that my deduction was due to my browsing but that should be under the 98 rupee package which was on auto renewal, so it did not make sense that my balance was deducted for browsing. Another time, the officer said that my account had been deducted twice for 98 rupees and before he could tell me anything else, the call was dropped. The third useful call was when the supervisor told me that my balance would be reimbursed within 20 minutes but that did not happen.

Even though I believe that the deduction was way more than an accidental extra 98 recharge, I would go with Airtel admitting its error and reimbursing me.

Only one time was there a request reference number provided to me which was CBDMO21212323399

Incident 13 Oct 2011

This was a hallmark of all thefts and made me believe what a low-life Airtel actually is.

I recharged my account for 333 on 1915 hours on 13th and a deduction of 206 rupees was made on 1916 hours which does not make any sense to me. They claimed it was for browsing but I could not have downloaded 206 rupees worth of data in a minute. Moreover, I had activated the 98 rupees plan which they said takes a day to activate but that information was not provided to me when I activated the plan and so it isn't my fault.

I complained on 14th December and a representative said that it would be resolved in 24 hours but it wasn't. I called on 15th December and was told it would get resolved by 18th but it wasn't. I called again on the 18th and they said it would get resolved on 21st but it wasn't. Then I was on a busy travelling and really could not cope with Airtel's mind games.

The complaint reference numbers are:

14th Dec CBNRA21014692440
15th Dec CBDMO21015357558

I don't have the 18th December complaint.

I sincerely hope that this forum is worth my while.

Rohan