Vodacom and MTN's dirty money-making scheme

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Jamie McKane

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Vodacom and MTN's dirty money-making scheme

Fraudulent wireless application service providers (WASPs) are taking money from Vodacom and MTN subscribers without their permission.

What makes the situation worse is that Vodacom and MTN are well aware of this problem but refuse to block these services by default.
 
This, including bank debit orders, should no longer exist in South Africa due to corporate greed, inability to monitor & prevent crime and losses incurred by consumers. They should be banned in total.
 
Visser said:
This, including bank debit orders, should no longer exist in South Africa due to corporate greed, inability to monitor & prevent crime and losses incurred by consumers. They should be banned in total.
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If it truly worried the consumers, they'd be on Telkom (or Cell C maybe).
 
Vodacom comments
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Vodacom confirmed that it is well aware of the illegal activity on its network, adding that it has taken a number of measures to block this activity.

This includes the suspension and termination of service providers and their affiliate content aggregators.

“Vodacom has subsequently installed a double opt-in option via USSD to confirm subscription to WASP content services,” it said.

“We also regularly upgrade our anti-fraud detection software to curb potential fraud.”

These measures, Vodacom said, have proven to be highly successful, as evidenced by the significant decline in WASP-related queries from Vodacom customers in recent months.

On the question of blocking all WASP billing by default, it said that “similar services around the world, such as Apple iStore and Google Play, are active by default”.

It added that for customers that prefer not to use credit cards, they can access and subscribe to services that they might otherwise not have access to.
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@Jamie McKane Did you ask them if the USSD authorization is also being used for vlive subscriptions?
 
i have a friend who works for vodacom and he told me they are very well aware of this and its actually vodacom's "VLIVE" (VODACOM LIVE) services which is the main culprit.
And VLIVE services dont come cheap, i got charged almost R 350.00 a month for 5 months.

the idea is 500 000 vodacom users (usually the red plan clients as they are most likely to just pay their bill instead of actually checking it or the lower end clients who dont really understand their bill) are charged fraudulently for VLIVE services, 500 000 at an average of R 100 a user is R 50 000 000.00. At most only 25% of those will pick it up on their bill and complain. those 25% will get reimbursed a little more than what they were charged in the form of a credit on their account. so lets say the reimburse 125 000 people at R 125 is R 15 625 000.000

Vodacom still scores a whopping R 34 375 000.00 in additional revenue A MONTH for doing jack.

its clear see why their CEO gets such an insane package.

I guess its hard to stop committing fraud when its this profitable.
 
An MTN consultant once told me I that was free to choose another network. On Telkom now and couldn't be happier.
 
So my broadband ask them the question directly why cant it be an opt in service not opt out, and see what their answer is no beating around the bush.
 
I was 7 years in WASP industry. Back when WASPA was toothless and it was the wild west, I was never the victim of rogue billing.

I seldom personally encountered a queried subscription that I could not pull a subscription opt in for. The majority had a legitimate audit trail.

But in the last few years most of my numbers have been the victim of billing with Vlive being the biggest culprit.

It has gotten worse, not better.
 
Jamie McKane said:
Vodacom and MTN's dirty money-making scheme

Fraudulent wireless application service providers (WASPs) are taking money from Vodacom and MTN subscribers without their permission.

What makes the situation worse is that Vodacom and MTN are well aware of this problem but refuse to block these services by default.
Click to expand...

If only we could call on an entity like TAG, mybb.co.za or Antitrust...
 
Just seen the following sms's in my B315 router at our family beach house. The router has an MTN 50GB Black Friday sim card in it and is only used in the router.

MTN WASP.PNG

Sms on 25 August subscribing to a WASP and then on the 26th another saying we must recharge, because I assume our account limit banned their billing.

These networks are taking the pi$$ and milking consumers with this WASP nonsense. No ways we signed up with this nonsense.
 
How can you compare the Apple or Google stores to a WASP service? Apple and Google actually give a —— about their customers and cannot be click jacked for fraudulent transactions.
 
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