Excessive and Inexplainable Roaming Rates

In October 2022 I traveled to Egypt. Activated roaming. Received confirmation of roaming as well as relevant rates on orange i.e. R7.50 per minute for international calls, R5 for local calls, R2.50 for receiving calls, R7.50 for SMS and R0.99 per MB.

I get to Egypt and my data is not roaming, its an inconvenience but its fine, I’m on Wi-Fi most of the time anyways. Calls are coming in and where necessary I make calls.

Fast forward, I’m back in the country and billing comes. Total minutes billed 54 (incoming and outgoing, no data billed as none was used), total amount R5 478.44. Now, even on the worst case scenario of R7.50 per minute for 54 minutes, I come to R405. I have called MTN multiple times to explain this to me and no one could. I have went to their store and no one understands how we got to 5k for the number of calls made. I have asked to speak to billing and apparently I can’t, I must speak to call center agents who also can’t explain this to me. They log a call and they response is “billing is correct”

Mind you, I had to pay R24 to get an itemized bill to try and understand the billing and when I got it and tried to take the agents through it, they all couldn’t explain the varying rates and total billed… all I got was “roaming is expensive “ I am not complaining about the expense but need to understand how it was computed. For example: In some instances I a billed R86 for 13sec and in some I am billed R86 for 6sec (all international calls)

It actually seems I was billed R100 + a minute and calls below a minute billed at R86. Now nothing here makes sense and no matter how many times I have pleaded with MTN they simply ignored me. When I indicated I would reverse the debit they simply said “it’s fine, that’s your credit record being messed up” and truly they don’t care, 3 months of reversed debits, suspended number and countless queries, no one had bothered to ask “how can we help you”. ****py service at its best. After I refer this to ICASA, me and my family are done with MTN.

Don’t bother with them and if you are already with them, don’t bother roaming on them, you better off with an international sim or hotel Wi-Fi.