Telecoms bandwidth fraud

Another fraud carried out by Australia’s telecommunications giants, although its technicality known about on forums, goes eerily silent past the law firms, ever so open to class action law suite, doors.

Since this information is now being made public, it can easily be expected that within weeks, the ever so eager justice seeking law firms will take charge in a class action law suite against the telecommunication giants.

Bandwidth or in this case the amount of data used is being deliberately falsely billed to customers.

The technology used (data collection techniques) by telcos to bill customers is the same throughout the organisation, be it for pre-paid or post-paid customers.

Under a pre-paid agreement, the consumer may have a data allowance, be it 250MB or 5GB of data for the duration of validity of the service typically 4 to 6 weeks.

Similarly customers that have a post-paid account or plan have an amount of data that can be used during a specified period of time.

There is one major difference between the two plans that being that on a pre-paid agreement, the data allocation is flagged to stop once the limit has been reached, whereas on a post-paid plan the user can still keep downloading material, at a significantly inflated price, where it is instantaneously billed to the account holder.

Pre-paid customers even though technically they have an account, no more finances can be extracted from the client, one the limits of talk/data have been reached, whilst post-paid are liable for additional charges.

Currently as an example Optus charge $0.10 per megabyte (or $100/ gigabyte) for excess data usage, whilst offering recharge vouchers of $40 with 1 gigabyte of data, or $100 with 5 gigabytes.

Under the latter recharge Optus are penalising the user 500% for excess data usage.

This deceitful practice has been going on for years without any action from the consumer watch dogs or telecoms industry ombudsman.

The corporate media term recently coined “Bill Shock” detracts from the severity and illegal operation of such an act. The correct term is fraud, under the misrepresentation banner, which is illegal under consumer law in Australia. 

What the masses are not aware is that not one single bill need to be paid in full under the “Bill Shock” label, but this could not have been made public, as this would deny the telcos profit made from misleading information, something that the legal eagles are not prepare to undertake against their ‘brethren’.