JEDDAH, 1 December 2002 – Saudi Telecom offices in several regions are being flooded with thousands of complaints about its SAWA prepaid mobile telephone cards.
The most common complaint is that a subscriber finds the new card he bought from a shop useless with no balance of money left in the card for which he paid SR100 a few minutes ago, Al-Watan reported yesterday. Subscribers want the STC to take immediate steps to end the practice of stealing the secret number and money from recharge cards.
In Dammam alone, 400 complaints were received at the customer service number 902 in a single day. Market sources attributed the problem to three possibilities.
One of them is, obviously, the absence of a strong security arrangement for the company that supplies the recharge cards.
The cards should be designed in such a way that no one can easily tamper with them.
The second possibility is the dishonest practices by workers at the selling points. They can discover the secret number with the help of a laser device. The third possibility is the forgery of cards.
This possibility is corroborated by the Passport Department’s recent arrest of some expatriates who were found selling forged cards.
However, a worker at a sales outlet puts the blame squarely on mischievous customers. Mohammed Awad, a Sudanese salesman in Arar, said he was cheated by a customer who bought a card but returned after a few minutes saying that he did not want the card but would buy it later, Al-Riyadh reported yesterday.
The salesman found that the card was intact inside the unopened plastic envelope and its secret number covered. He took back the card and sold it to another man who complained that there was no money left in the card.
Awad said there were several instances of people returning the cards with similar complaints.
He also disclosed that it is very easy to read the secret the number with the help of a laser devise that costs only SR5. Some shopkeepers have started to warn the customers that once sold the cards would not be taken back.
A distributor of SAWA cards, Mohammed Al-Molhem, said he has already lost SR30,000 because of forged or tampered cards. Though he has complained to STC, the problem still persists. He pointed out that the lead covers used in other countries to conceal the secret numbers are more secure than the covers used in SAWA cards.
