Malaysia operator DiGi accused of voicemail rip-off

DiGi, the third largest mobile telecoms operator in Malaysia, has been accused of tinkering with its voicemail settings to deliberately rip-off its customers. Independent news agency Mathaba alleges that the operator is making an additional 500,000 MYR (150,000 US$) revenue per year from the set-up.

Details of the Mathaba allegations are below.

Tests show that the…operator is sending calls to voice-mail even when [a] phone is receiving a strong network signal.

When a [customer] does not respond to calls that DiGi does pass through, the time before being routed to voice-mail is very short, compared to other overseas operators, not allowing the mobile phone user sufficient time to answer incoming calls before the caller is routed to voice-mail.

Each time a call is routed to voice mail from a Digi phone, the caller is billed 12 cents, and charges for calls routed to DiGi voicemail from other operators may be even higher.

A shortened ring time would makes calls to a DiGi cell user more likely to go to voicemail incurring the calling, and person calling, additional costs.

However the DiGi customer, it is alleged, foots an additional extra cost too.

Digi users are forced to call their voicemail, again whilst being billed, in order to retrieve messages left by callers who would have otherwise reached the subscribers handset, were it not for the tweaking of systems to route callers to voicemail.

The article does admit that DiGi is not the only Malaysia operator taking advantage of its customers.

Mathaba has found extensive cheating by all 3 large Malaysian mobile telcos, which rate worse than those of its neighbors Singapore and Thailand.

These allegation comes days after the Norwegian-owned Telenor Group, the majority shareholder in DiGi, launched a pan-Asian corporate branding campaign “built around people”.

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