CAT and TOT slammed

[george]

Telecom agencies slammed

Published on Oct 23, 2003

A House committee yesterday reprimanded two state-run telephone-service providers for prosecuting the unwitting victims of illegal overseas-call schemes instead of cracking down on the wrongful use of numbers to make such calls.

The House committee on consumer protection also expressed concern over an increase in unpaid overseas calls due to fraud, estimated to have leapt from Bt19 million in 1998 to Bt236 million last year.

The two agencies in question - TOT Corp and CAT Telecom - admitted at the hearing that they might have been pursuing the wrong course in their attempts to fight telephone fraud.

Their admission came in the wake of testimony from nine Samut Songkhram residents who are embroiled in civil suits seeking payments of between Bt80,000 and Bt100,000 for overseas calls that they say they never made.

The defendants told the House hearing that the two service providers had gone ahead with litigation even though none of the nine had ever owned the mobile phones from which the calls originated.

They also said calls had been made minutes apart to numbers in Burma and China, countries which they had never visited or had any contact with.

Committee adviser Nipon Boonyapattaro said the two agencies should have tried to pinpoint the process used to illegally register the offending mobile-phone numbers.

Nipon voiced suspicion that fraudulent documents had been used to evade detection.

"Instead of improving the registration process for making overseas calls, TOT Corp and CAT Telecom have taken the easy way by demanding payments from people who do not have the means to fight a legal battle," he said.

Mobile-phone service providers have reported an alarming rise in telephone registration violations, which has led to unpaid calls.

Market leader Advanced Info Service (AIS) has uncovered 3,268 violations in the past four years, costing the company Bt49 million.

In the same period, DTAC found 7,148 cases, amounting to Bt120 million in unpaid bills.

Democrat MP Rangsima Rodrasamee suggested the registration process for mobile phones be tightened.

--THE NATION 2003-10-23