"MTN BILL SHOCK!"

<p>After having a cell phone account with MTN since 1996 and having a current monthly bill average of well under R2000, my account was suddenly suspended last week without notice because apparently I had exceeded my credit limit of R11600. When I phoned the call centre to enquire I was told that my total billed and unbilled future balance came to a total of over R18000. I was totally shocked to find out that the excess was all due to out of bundle packet switched data calls from my secondary sim which was in an ipad used by my son for school textbooks. Unbeknown to us he had been streaming from the internet without realising the wifi connection to our home network was not working. When confronting MTN at their service centre at 14th ave, I asked how firstly a credit limit of R11600 could be set on a bill that never, ever exceeded R2000 and more importantly if my credit limit was R11600 how did the bill run to over R18000? And secondly why I was never contacted or informed that I was consuming so much out of bundle data. Their response was that it was due to the fact that a data only sim cannot receive warning messages. If this was the case, why would they not contact the primary account holder (the sims are linked to one account) and inform me about it as I can receive these messages on my iphone. I can tell you why! It's because MTN are too happy to "catch" people with out of bundle data charges due to the massively increased margins they make on these mishaps. This happens so often that MTN staff have a term called BILL SHOCK which describes my predicament. I cannot pay this and await a response from MTN management to negotiate an acceptable outcome. They are yet to come back to me regarding the high credit limit issue which was never approved by myself as well as why notifications were never sent. I wait with baited breath!</p>