Abusive! DSTv's Day Light ******* With Impunity is Shameful - A Typical Monopoly! Competition Commisioner You Need Intervene!

On the 16th Dec '21, I signed up for a streaming-only Premium subscription on their December promotion offering R699 premiums for 3 months, on their online self-service system. My application was smooth until I was meant to make payment. I selected the Ozow payment option for instant EFT and went ahead to authorize an R209.70 pro-rata fee (automatically generated by the DStv system).

Payment ran from my account and sent me back to DStv and all hell broke loose and everything froze, needless to say, I had no service access. I thought I'd give it a day and perhaps their system would become responsive again, to no avail, until I eventually reached out to a chat consultant (Percy) for assistance, Percy went ahead and gave me access on the 17th of Dec and I thought the matter was resolved until I took a look at my account on MyDStv to find that I had some new charges billed to me that I now needed to pay. I asked Percy about all the additional charges and he was quick to reassure me they were raised in error and would resolve themselves (I have this chat screenshot on record).

Shortly before the 20th, I began receiving SMSes stating I owe DStv and my services will be suspended, these were eventually suspended on the 20th. I called the contact center and was advised that Percy has subscribed me for two additional decoder subscriptions and that this is how my streaming-only service was reconnected. I was sent to cancellations to remedy this, and I was then informed by Adrian Swart that I was actually meant to pay a pro-rata fee plus the following months premium (i.e. January), I obliged and paid an additional R831.30 which was a second pro-rata payment plus the next month's payment, Adrian went ahead to ensure that I have services active from the 20th yet again but informed me that the previous R209.40 would be allocated to my account and provisioned as credit for my next premium in Feb.

By the 25th, when my bill for February was raised on the MyDStv dashboard I was now all of a sudden supposed to pay a total of R950.31 for some reason. At this point, I still had access to viewing services, and I called the contact center after trying to get answers from countless so-called Live Chat Support staff (completely useless bunch, the lot of them) about what was going on, I eventually called the contact center and reached a billing consultant who I explained the issue to and she explained that when February's bill was raised, I was charged the full R829 fee and when the R130 discount was app****, it was immediately reversed, and an additional R121 was added for an unknown reason, and this was the reason I would have to pay R950.31 for February, we both agreed that this is in error, and she asked me to send the proof of my transaction of the original pro-rata fee I paid on the 16th Dec, and she confirmed that she had reversed the R121 and would escalate my proof of payment and the discount reversal, and this should be fixed in between 48 and 72 hours.

This did not happen, and after a number of follow-ups with the contact center and numerous escalations (with reference numbers I've lost count of), I was eventually informed that my proof of payment was not an acceptable form of proof and that I was now supposed to get in touch with my bank. The bank guided me to retrieve an interim statement which I was told to take to a service center since the call center agents were apparently unable to handle billing allocations.

I went to the Alberton service center in Mall of the South on the 18th Jan '22 and was assisted by Prince Dhlamini the manager, who was understanding and tried to be helpful and explained that I'm preempting a problem with my billing and I'd like it resolved before I have issues and services are suspended again. Prince took my statement and escalated the matter and we agreed that should the 25th Jan come up and this is still unresolved, I would only pay what I should be paying which should be R489 (i.e. R699 - R209.70) and indicated that as long as I have paid something, my services should not be suspended and that the escalation should've been resolved by then anyway.

This did not work out as planned as I showed up at the service center on the 25th Jan to pay the R489 since no progress had been made since reporting the matter on the 18th, I made the payment and confirmed again with Prince that my services should remain resuspended should this not be resolved, and he confirmed this.

I received an SMS on the 26th stating I owe an arbitrary amount of money and my services will be suspended, they were suspended shortly thereafter, and I informed Prince of this and he promised to have them restored, he did and I was up before the day was over. I again received another SMS on the 27th and services were suspended again, I brought this up with Prince on the 28th furious that I am compelled by DStvt to pay for daily use of their service but they find it easy to simply ignore me when I have paid in full for services but was not getting any because of a fault on DStv's side, but there seems to be no sense of urgency to resolve the matter at my expense, Prince offered to call me back by 1 pm to let me know if he was able to resolve the matter, which he did. When he called me, he told me that none of his 2 escalations were being responded to and that he is out of options, and that I should rather write a Hello Peter complaint (since there is no complaints service internally in Multichoice since they couldn't really be bothered) and that I should be able to get someones attention here, and then maybe this matter can be resolved. I understood princes communication and confirmed with him that I couldn't cancel my subscription with him at the service center, he confirmed that this isn't possible and that I need to call the call center to do so.

Since Monday the 30th I've been calling the call center to try and cancel my subscription and request a refund for a breach of the service agreement (because I was not given what I had paid for, and instead my transition statement reflects that I'm being charged an R26.74 daily subscription charge daily since the 25th Jan) since I have no other option to remedy this available to us customers, and frankly, I've spent too much time, money and effort trying to resolve this since I signed up that I really don't care anymore.

Now my problem is that of all the 6 or so phone calls I've made to the call center (in some cases holding the line for up to an hour) waiting to speak to someone in the cancellations department, the phone is not answered until I either run out of time to wait or the line hangs itself up ( I recorded these phone calls and can provide these recordings on request), which essentially means I can't cancel and get my refund, nor can I get any assistance in resolving my billing issues and restoring services.

Because Multichoice is a monopoly and clearly is not accountable to any governing body in this country (including the Consumer Commission, who states you are supposed to give the service provider a chance to remedy the problem within a prescribed period of time), we as customers have to suffer frustration and endless incompetence, and a general "don't-care" attitude from DStv for a service they have ensured that no one else in the market can provide, and we simply have to accept that, this is unacceptable.

Should I not receive a response to this complaint from DStv by today I'll be gathering all my records of communications and compiling a formal complaint with the consumer commission since I have tried to resolve this for well over a month now, and there's no clear way forward. As I write this I have no services and no progress on resolution.

All I want at this point is for someone to help me cancel this subscription and give me my money back, please.