I was overcharged for services, but is unable to receive the money without providing my personal banking details.

For the past year I had numerous troubles with Telkom from the day I requested a landline up to today post-cancellation. I am still awaiting feedback for a complaint I logged in April 2017, thus sending another complaint to Telkom regarding this issue will be proven useless and I will not waste my time.

My personal information is mine to protect and I am cautious to provide my banking details and would rather EFT payments to companies, than providing my banking details for them to use. From previous experiences the current POPI Act does not provide me the security that I need so that I can request my personal information to be erased from a company that I do not do business with anymore.

After a lot of phone calls and a Telkom Call Center Supervisor insisting that the cancellation takes 30 working days, when I had an official reply from the Cancellation Department stating it would only take 21 working days, the line was cut on 1 December 2017. On 30 November 2017 when I phoned, I was told that the final payment would only be R300.30 which I already paid by EFT. To my surprise I received an invoice on 23 December 2017 stating that Telkom owed me R158.37. That is more than half of what I was told would be the final payment. The nearest Telkom store is 60km away so I went there to sort this and to get my money back. The Worcester Mountain Mill Telkom Store's Supervisor informed me that I will have to provide a bank statement with all my personal details and my ID so that the money can be paid into my account. No compromise, no other options, just that. I will have to provide my personal banking details to Telkom, which I intentionally did not want to do in the first place, otherwise I would have signed a debit order!

If Telkom had done their part of the cancellation correctly, I would not feel so exposed right now. If I do not provide my banking details, I will not receive the money they owe me. If I provide my banking details, how will I know that it will be removed from their system when the payment is complete? Must I now open a new bank account just to receive my money and then close the account again? This is nonsense! Telkom has various options for clients to make payments to them, but when they owe the money there is only one option.

Never will I recommend Telkom to anyone.