Agents sell postpaid mobile connections to workers

Dubai: A group of blue-collar workers said they have been duped by agents of telecom giant du into taking postpaid mobile connections, a facility only extended to customers with a minimum salary of Dh2,500.

Low-income workers living in accommodations in Al Muhaisnah told Gulf News that three agents claiming to be from du visited their accommodation one Friday night during Ramadan to offer them some “free SIM cards with 300 minutes and 1GB data packages” that could be used for a month.

“I asked him what if I didn’t want to use it after one month. The agent said I could call the du service centre or I could just discontinue using it and it would be cut automatically,” Iqbal Hussain, 27, from Bangladesh, told Gulf News.

When contacted by Gulf News, a spokesperson from du said: “As a licensed telecom service provider in the UAE, we firmly uphold the standards and regulations put forth by the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority and our internal regulations pertaining to process and transparency, and we fully abide by them. We take complaints of this nature very seriously and have a zero-tolerance policy with regard to any fraudulent activity and non-eligible sales of postpaid plans by our partners.”

According to Hussain, more than a dozen of his friends at the labour accommodation availed of the “promotion”. Some time later, after getting the package, the workers received a “call from the du office”.

“Twenty minutes later, I got a call from someone who said he’s from the du office and asked me why I had not activated the SIM card yet,” Murad Mahmoud, 29, said.

“It was then that he told me that it was a postpaid plan and I had to pay Dh150 every month. I told him I wasn’t interested,” the security guard said, adding he has not opened the packaging of the sim card until now out of fear.

Some of the workers said they later called the du service centre to cancel the connections only to be told that they had to pay a Dh300 early disconnection fee.

“He [agent] told me I could cancel after a month. He cheated us,” Hussain said. “It’s like they cast out a net and caught us all.”

The du spokesperson, however, said this was an isolated case that they have taken necessary action on as a matter of priority.

“In this particular instance, the complaint was immediately escalated to the relevant partner’s management, and corrective action was taken immediately,” the spokesperson said.

“We would like to assure our customers that anyone who was affected by these actions will not bear any costs as a result, and we would like to extend our apologies for any inconvenience they may have faced. As a responsible telecommunications operator, we are committed to transparency and we take the necessary steps to educate the public about our sales procedures on a regular basis.”

Samaul, another complainant, said: “If it’s postpaid and we have to pay Dh150 monthly, we wouldn’t have agreed because we can get more call minutes to Bangladesh for just Dh50 from the other network’s promotion.”

The workers said the agents took their Emirates ID copy and told them that if someone from du called them they should say they were earning more than Dh2,500, a minimum requirement to get a postpaid line. The workers are currently earning less than Dh2,000.

According to the du receipt seen by Gulf News, apart from a valid ID, an applicant also needs to present at least one supporting document such as a utility bill, a valid payslip that is signed and stamped, a UAE-issued credit card, or tenancy contract. None of the boxes were ticked.

Hussain said the form is in English and the workers never really understood the terms in the contract and relied on the agents’ verbal explanation.