February 23, 2002	Saturday	Zilhaj 10, 1422

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HARIPUR, Feb 22: A number of telephone subscribers of Haripur have complained against the apathetic attitude of the PTCL authorities for sending them inflated bills with bogus entries of calls and amount every month.

It has been observed that the telephone bills dispatched to subscribers by the PTCL every month in Haripur carry a discrepancy of a number of amounts and bogus insertions of telephone calls that subscribers never make but are shown so tactfully that a common subscriber can hardly notice.

As per modus operandi adopted by the PTCL authorities, such a wrong bill when issued to a subscriber, normally shows the same dialled number with its almost correct duration, a subscriber once made, but in the column next to the aforementioned call is inserted another call of usually one minute duration of the same telephone number with Rs 2.1 in the amount’s column.

It is noted that a bill contains over 25pc of this type of bogus entry, thus, raising the amount and volume of a bill issued to a subscriber.

The available record of such inflated bills with Dawn depicts that the authorities have made the subscribers to pay in millions extra to their genuine bills.

“I have been paying for such bogus calls for the last 12 months and in spite of repeated complaints the authorities concerned never cared for,” said Bakhtzada Khan, a local shopkeeper who usually pays Rs 1,000 to 1,200 per month as extra in the shape of such entries.

He said when he started receiving such calls he made complaint to the authorities concerned, immediately, and got his bill corrected.

But now, he added, the OTR’s officials decline his request with the plea that it would be fault on the subscriber’s end who unknowingly hung up the receiver after getting a dialled number unattended for.

When contacted, a source at the telephone exchange told Dawn on the condition of anonymity that as the modern digital telephony was most sophisticated, with high speed, the duration of unattended call and frequent dialling for a busy number was also being shown as units consumed by a subscriber, who, in fact, did not know.