Check Your Telco Phone Bills!

Yes, please check your Telco phone bills every month, including the itemised bill. I don't usually go through it thoroughly until I did for this month's as my bill was rather high, considering the fact that I hardly made any calls out.

Well, surprise, surprise! I saw "value-added services" in my bill and was curious about it. Decided to check my previous bills after and I got the shock of my life when I'm getting charge on a monthly basis! What's worse was I have been charged since last November 2013 for at least RM 20 monthly. I know some may think RM 20 is not much but heck, I was charged for almost a year for nothing so no way I'm paying for that!

Just a sample to show you how I'm getting billed for value-added services eh? -_-

Being puzzled at what the services are all about, I made a call to DiGi for some clarification and explanation. The person who's spoken to me was really kind to explain what the value-added services are. APPARENTLY, this is a third party company named HyperQB that's charging me and DiGi can only give me the company's contact details to claim the money back. Reason being is that the company is actually licensed to charge telco users as such and DiGi can do nothing to stop it.

Just a heads up, this may happen either:-

1. You've subscribed something long time ago when you received some weird SMS-es e.g. "Send ON to 33xxx to subscribe to HOT Videos" (the content message is made up and if it's any similar to anyone's sms, it's purely coincidental). 
2. You did not subscribe for anything and they will still charge you (depends if you're lucky or unlucky). 

So after finding out more about the so-called value-added services, I was advised to send two messages out to the specific numbers that were charging me, which are OFF and STOP ALL to the every number that's charged me.

Next step? Contact the relevant parties to inform them I've not subscribed anything from their company and I was getting charged on a monthly basis! I've emailed them and they were really responsive and agreed to credit the money back into my phone number (THANK GOODNESS!).

So yeah, voila! I've gotten back RM 140 from them and these were only based on the bills that I managed to retrieve. In fact, I was lucky enough to get so much refund from them as according to the person from DiGi, some who have been paying RM 300 for this nonsense only managed to obtain a small amount or up to 50% refund.

This is definitely a lesson learnt - always, ALWAYS, check your bills for every detail as you may never know that you might be paying extras someday.