Telkom cancellation: Exploitation of their clients

I will be lodging a formal complaint with the Ombudsman at the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (https://www.icasa.org.za/pages/consumer-complaints-procedure) regarding my account with Telkom Mobile.

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I have been trying to cancel my contract with Telkom Mobile for more than a year. It is an impossible task as you get absolutely no assistance from the call center staff. They promise to always send you the cancellation forms as you cannot download them online. I have, up to date, not received any documents pertaining to my cancellation request. I have requested, on many occasions, the email address' and contact details of a floor manager, but never supp**** with information to escalate the matter. The result, my account handed over to NuDebt. They have since closed my account due to my ongoing dispute with Telkom, ON INSTRUCTION FROM TELKOM. Telkom has apparently also closed my account. On Sunday the 17th of February 2019 a debit order went through for the amount of R1070.88, I had to reverse this amount with Standard Bank. Today 20 February 2019 another amount for R803.15 was debited from my account, that I also had to reverse. Each time I have to reverse the Telkom debit order, this has a cost implication of between R40 - R150 in bank charges. I have requested Standard Bank SA to block the Telkom debit order. They were unable as you have to stipulate the date and exact amount that will be debited, any changes to any of these and the debit order goes through.

I see this is a trend with Telkom, they change to random amounts and random dates to avoid being blocked by your bank. My initial amount being R299 per month.

I initially wanted to cancel my contract with Telkom as they would not deduct the correct amounts, one month R299 will be debited the following R519 the next R720 and so on, every time I had to dispute. Further the reception kept getting worse.

After many failed attempts to cancel my contract on 081180 I resorted to the online chat platform. I had a conversation with a person (Lindiwe Constan) where they mentioned that my contract is only ending later in May, when I brought to her attention that I signed for a two year contract and I have had the contract for more than three years she mentioned that it was her mistake and she could see that the contract ended on the 24th of May 2016. It seems that Telkom exploits people for money as you cannot cancel. I realized it this month when my girlfriend tried to cancel her contract with Telkom, to date she has not received any joys in her process to cancel. She was led to believe that there is fantastic reception for Telkom in her area. I have experienced the slow internet and the constant down time. To such an extent that we put our phones hotspots on. She now has to pay a massive cancellation fee and keep the service running for another month. To date her cancellation has not been processed and the monthly installments keeps going off.

If you cannot cancel your services they will keep on debiting you to the point that you are threatened that you will get a bad credit rating. They exploit their so called clients in this way. If they only do this to a 1000 people they will have made massive revenue over a period of 12 months with people that wanted to stop a debit order and a service. I am not going to stand for this as I have now seen how many people have been affected by this business model. I feel that as a consumer of a product/service I should be able to opt out or cancel at any time without any inconveniences.

As mentioned in the beginning of my letter, I will make sure that I lodge a formal complaint with the Ombudsman to stop Telkom's business model. They market with their tents and flag poles on every street corner in Pretoria, I am sure in other cities as well, to people that think they are getting incredible deals just to find themselves in the same position as my self or sometimes worse.