How MTN Scammed Me

On the 24th of February 2010, I went into Bodlinks Ltd, an MTN dealer located at Ring Road in Ibadan, purchased the MTN monthly internet bundle and paid the sum of N10,000 for the service. The reference number for the transaction is 0180930475. However, to my surprise the service became erratic after two days and stopped working on the fourth day. I was on a business-related to Lagos, as such, I could not immediately report this apparent anomally personally to Bodlinks MTN.

On the 3rd of March, I went to the Bodlinks MTN Office to report the situation. I must confess that the reception I received was purely abysmal. The Office Manager, Bode Obube was not in, but one of the staff in the office, named Patience put me on the phone with him. Bode basically blamed for what happened. He said I was required to activate the service, and since I did not activate the service, I basically burned N10,000 in four days! And that there is absolutely nothing he can do about it. I now asked him a very simple question. Why would a service that requires activation work without it being activated? Another question I asked him is why I wasn’t prompted to activate the service.

 I also asked him if he would pay N10,000 for four days of internet use. As usual, he could not answer these questions. All he could do was to basically blame me for what happened. What Bode Obube obviously thought is because I can afford to pay N10,000 for internet service, I could afford to forget about what happened and pay another N10,000. But, he got it wrong, I will not let anyone, not even MTN take away my hard earned money. After I got off the phone, an office staff named Patience took my name and contact phone and promised to get back to me the following day for a possible resolution. It is now over a week, and I have not heard from Bodlinks MTN. This goes a long way to show the culture at MTN.

I am going to ask MTN the same question I asked Bode Obube. Why would a service that requires activation work without being activated? Would anyone at MTN, even your Executives pay N10,000 for four days of internet use? And why would the system not prompt a customer to activate the service? The simple reason is MTN thinks Nigerians are fools. These are the Nigerians that bailed MTN out. MTN, prior to its entry into Nigeria was an unknown telecoms company. Is this how you repay Nigerians? By scamming us because MTN believes Nigerians won’t complain or we just basically don’t know our rights? I believe the NCC should take note of this, and require that for all services requiring activation, telecoms operators must insert commands into their products that would prompt customers to activate such. Anything short of this, is a scam. It is very instructive to note that I took an informal survey of close relatives and acquaintances that are or were MTN customers, and what I heard confirmed that MTN is all about noise, but very little or no customer service. Cases of customers who are still receiving bills from MTN for services they’ve discontinued, shoddy and non-responsive customer service, etc. I believe a class action law suit should be filed against MTN for all their excesses, and the process should and will start very soon.

I am by this note asking MTN to refund the N10,000 I paid for the purported monthly internet bundle that turned out to be a scam. I have being an MTN customer since 2008, and at this point no longer interested in anything MTN. The only reason I will keep my MTN phone is because it has been my only number in Nigeria since 2008.

In ending, I will want to state that I took every step possible to resolve this issue through Bodlinks MTN, but after waiting two weeks, and being denied the use of convenient internet service I paid for, I had to other option than to expose it to the whole world.