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Cape Town - Sechaba Majola and his daughter Aima Jwalane are VIP clients with Vodacom. They turned to Fin24 seeking help with incorrect billing from Vodacom owing to fraud.
"Despite having a monthly limit, they deduct R11 000 from his account every month and state they can not do anything about it until they have investigated the case."
Aima's father, who has a VIP account with Vodacom, got her a two year Smart Saver contract that was linked to his account in 2014.
"His account gets renewed automatically and they send him a phone when this happens. My contract was automatically renewed last year to Smart More Data 2GB, in which case they did not consult us at all on whether we would like to renew/upgrade and which phone we would like."
Se explained that in October 2015, they got a bill of approximately R26 000 because they supposedly exceeded their data usage. After that incident her dad placed a monthly cap of R2 500 on their account. However, in November 2016 Vodacom deducted R34 037.43 from his account, which his bank reversed.
"When we called Vodacom, they stated that the amount was correct and that my dad’s account was linked to several other numbers since 2012. These were the accounts that had went over the limit."
Aima said Vodacom delinked the numbers but could not cancel her dad's bill until an investigation was completed.
"In December 2016, the same thing happened. My dad has now been blacklisted."
She explained that he received an SMS that his number was linked to another number. "He also received an SMS stating that his Vodacom account is R41 971.37 in arrears."
Aima said she was concerned about how Vodacom secures their clients' personal information. Her father went to the police for an affidavit to send to Vodacom stating that he has not linked any numbers to his account.
She said this is frustrating because Vodacom acknowledged two numbers were unlawfully linked to her father's account.
A Vodacom spokesperson responds:
Vodacom would like to reiterate that it has zero tolerance towards any type of illegal activity occurring on its network and we do our best to prevent it.
Following a thorough investigation on this matter, our fraud and risk department confirmed that the numbers 0769940145 and 0798900660 were fraudulently upgraded. The two fraudulent upgrades have been cancelled and a credit has been passed.
