A frustrated Telkom customer was allegedly scammed out of 20G internet data by Telkom employees at a branch in Rosebank.
According to Divan Erasmus, internet data worth R599 was purchased at a Telkom store for his router which he intended to use in early August. To his surprise, upon loading the voucher, he received an error message asking him to recharge.
Erasmus claims the original receipt received with the voucher number, revealed that the data was loaded to a different user yet the employees had confirmed his cellphone number before the transaction was complete.
“After investigating, I realised that the lady inserted a different number when I looked at the receipt,” explained Erasmus.
“How she got lucky with me not using it [data] till today is astonishing, to say the least.”
Erasmus said he approached Telkom but he alleges the employees took the alleged fraud further by providing him with a fraudulent receipt that had an incorrect date of purchase.
“The Telkom representative went as far as forging the receipt,” alleged Erasmus.
“The receipt is clearly for 7 October, they forgot to make it the day I actually purchased the data.”
A disappointed Erasmus took to Hello Peter, the world’s largest customer review website, to alert Telkom of his dilemma. A day later he received a response from Telkom apologising for the delay and stress caused, and requesting his personal particulars, but nothing further happened.
The Telkom customer has expressed his dissatisfaction saying the incident was a ‘disgusting display of corporate manipulation’.
In a statement Telkom said, “We have investigated this matter and can confirm that in error the data voucher was loaded on an incorrect number. The data allocated to the incorrect number was not used and has expired.
“We also confirm that the matter was resolved and the data has been loaded on the correct number. We are clear that this was not fraudulent… but simply human error. We apologise to our customer for the inconvenience caused.”
