June 19, 2006	Monday	Jumadi-ul-Awwal 22, 1427

Please Visit our Sponsor (Ads open in separate window).

MULTAN, June 18: After complaints of dramatic loss of prepaid balance, subscribers of a leading cellular phone company face another problem — new prepaid cards already used.

Traders who deal in mobile phones and connections said that complaints about the Mobilink prepaid scratch cards were increasing and there hardly passed a day when someone did not approach them with an identical plaint - “when we try to load the card, the company system says the card has already been used”.

Some of the traders said that they had stopped keeping scratch cards of the company to avoid the wrath of their customers. “Company does not take responsibility of a card once it is scratched while the customer seizes us by the collar,” says Anwar Bhutta, a mobile phone dealer in the city’s Al-Rehma Market.

Baber Ali, another dealer from Duniapur town in Lodhran district, is however in possession of hundreds of prepaid cards of the company which are yet to be scratched but their balance has already been used.

Baber Ali, who owns one of the largest mobile phone outlets in Duniapur, got a pack of 750 cards of Rs 100 each for subscribers of the company’s prepaid connection named after a popular music genre. Ali said when a number of customers returned with the identical complaint, he refunded their money, stopped further sale of the cards and took the stock bearing glittering password coating layer to the company’s main office in Multan.

He said a senior official of the company got checked status of the cards from their serial numbers and informed him that they had already been used. He said the official told him that the cards were originally supplied to the company’s franchised outlet working at Multan’s Kumharanwala Chowk and refused to cooperate further.

Babar said his pleas of identifying the culprits who had used the stolen balance through the company’s network also fell on deaf ears.

Some local traders told Dawn that a SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) of the same company was also being sold to the public call offices under the title of ‘Disposable SIM’ with unlimited outgoing facility for a certain period of time, after which they expired automatically. “Price of the SIM ranged from Rs 1000 to Rs 5000, depending on the usage of the particular PCO, and it can expire even before the stipulated time on taking an incoming call,” a dealer elaborated.

It may be added here that the subscribers of the same cellular company in Rahim Yar Khan had recently undergone the problem of sudden loss of the remaining balance of their prepaid connections. When this correspondent contacted the regional authorities of the company in Multan to have their side of the story, they simply refused to utter any word saying the company’s public relations department was the only forum to ask questions.

When the PR officials of the company’s head office in Islamabad were contacted, they said that the queries be sent to them so that they could furnish replies after getting briefing from the technical side. At this, a set of questions was emailed on Tuesday last (June 13).

The queries were: Is it possible technically to create/manufacture such a SIM that can steal/hack (through mobile sets) pre-paid accounts? If not, then how does the company explain the complaints about the loss of credit/balance of some of its pre-paid account users? And what measures the company has taken so far to make its system foolproof? After two days of dilly delaying, an official of the company’s PR department refused to answer the questions. “We will soon send an official from Islamabad to meet and explain you the entire matter in person,” he said.