CALLERTUNEZ, another tool for gargantuan airtime loot

I honestly subscribe to multinationals who invest in Africa, and their local partners making good money. In fact, I root for the locals on the periphery of the tech industry to make more money. But they must do so legally and ethically. Sadly, it is not so in some cases, particularly when it comes to telcos and some of their VAS partners.

I have come to the evidence-based conclusion that telcos, which operate in Africa have no respect for Africans. What they cannot dream of doing in other markets outside of Africa, they do comfortably in Africa, taking full and fraudulent advantage of the largely tech-illiterate population of the continent. And they get away with it because our regulators are largely captured by these telcos.

Anyone who followed my #StopTheAirtimeLoot campaign would know by now that the telcos and their VAS providers make it a habit to secretly sign on subscribers to about 95 paid services and steal our airtime without our consent in blatant violation of the Unsolicited Electronic Communications (UEC) Code of Conduct of the National Communications Authority (NCA) and the Electronic Communications Act.

In doing so, they steal millions of Ghana cedis in daily and weekly deductions from unsuspecting subscribers and share the loot, with the telcos taking more than a lion's share (up to 80%).

NCA Directive Violated

As if the existing laws against this fraud were not enough, following our spirited campaign against this deliberate and gargantuan loot, the NCA issued a directive specifically asking VAS providers and telcos to implement a two-step verification process in signing on subscribers to any paid electronic communication services.

Per the directive, the service provider is supposed to wait for the subscriber to first make a request for any VAS and after the request is made, they are to send a confirmation message to the subscriber to accept before they can sign the subscriber on and bill them.

Since the directive was issued, we have made numerous complaints to the NCA about how the two-step verification process is being blatantly violated, but to date, the NCA has not bothered to crack the whip on any telco or VAS provider. Indeed, the shortcodes used in the loot were licenced by the NCA so they seem to find it difficult to deal with the perpetrators.

Only in Africa

This gargantuan airtime loot by the telcos and their so-called VAS partners happens only in Africa. Vodafone is one of the biggest telcos in the world and they operate in many other countries outside Africa. Airtel is one of the biggest operators in its homeland, India, while the African giant, MTN operated in the Middle East for a long time before focusing only on Africa. You never hear of such airtime loot and deliberate fraud on the networks of these telcos in any of those markets except in Africa.

Recently, MTN South Africa and Vodacom South Africa were found to have defrauded their customers heavily in airtime loot schemes, which they both hid from shareholders.

They know too well not to try that kind of fraud on the more enlightened populations in Europe, Asia, Australia, the Middle East and the Americas. And they dare not try that crime in the face of the tough regulatory environment in those regions.

But here in Africa, the population is not very much tech-savvy, and the regulators are largely in bed with operators, particularly when it comes to consumer complaints. Regulators only get hard on operators when it comes to quality of service fines and surtaxes that will put money in their pockets.

But consumer issues like protection from the airtime loot, either through UEC or callertunez, are not much of a concern to the regulators.

CALLERTUNEZ for the loot

Techgh24 has done a lot of work on the airtime loot via the UECs, and we are still waiting for NCA to crack the whip. But the other looting tool, which has been here since time immemorial but is now getting the attention of subscribers is caller ring back tones (CRBT) otherwise known as caller tunes, usually written as CallerTunez.

A caller tune is the song or voice note other people hear when they call your phone, instead of hearing the regular phone ringtone. So, you never get to hear that song or voice note but you pay for it every month. Depending on which network you are on, caller tunes are available on the following shortcodes:

• MTN – *1355#

• Vodafone – *585#

• AirtelTigo – *200#

I gathered that in Ghana, caller tunes cost 30Gp per download, following which there is a monthly renewal fee of between 26Gp and 62Gp, depending on which network you are on. This download money (30Gp) is shared between the telcos and their infrastructure vendors (Huawei and Ericsson) on one hand, and the VAS providers and content owners (musicians and speech makers) on the other hand.

As usual, the telcos and their vendors take more than a lion's share (21Gp) and give the VAS players and musicians, who actually own the content, only 9Gp to share. The wickedness of the first order!

But the monthly fee that the customer pays for remaining on the caller tunes platform, managed by the telcos and their infrastructure vendors, is shared between the two with nothing for the VAS providers and more importantly the content owners whose work is the reason the platform exists in the first place.

So, even without downloading any new song/voice note, the customer keeps paying the monthly fee, which is an additional cool free money for the telcos and their vendors, while they also milk the musicians and VAS providers for song download. This wicked revenue share arrangement should even concern the regulator but they don’t care.

The Fraud

But the fraud here is that several people are being signed on to the caller tunes platform without their consent and their money is being stolen every month, just like in the case of the other looting subscriptions that steal our money daily and weekly.

So, they sign you on and download their own choice of song for you and charge you for the download and then they keep charging you every month for remaining on the platform, even if you don’t make any downloads. Pure and unadulterated daylight fraud.

Even without signing on customers to caller tunes without their consent, it is bad enough for them to convince musicians with a message of giving them some value through selling their songs as caller tunes, only for them to come up with such wicked revenue share arrangements.

My information is that some musicians end up getting as low as GHS5 every quarter (three months) from the caller tunes arrangement. A few whose songs are quite big are able to get up to GHS1,500 a quarter. Meanwhile, the telcos have signed contracts with VAS providers to absolve themselves from all liabilities in the relationship.

So, they take the lion's share of the money but if the content provider has issues, it stops with the VAS provider. The telcos don’t owe them anything.

Now upon all that unfair arrangement, subscribers are also being defrauded through unsolicited caller tunes subscriptions. Telcos pretend as if they do not make money from that avenue and yet look through town and you will see billboards and signboards by telcos advertising caller tunes like nobody’s business.

They encourage the consumer to sign on to caller tunes and yet in many cases, they do not even wait for the customer to subscribe to the service by themselves, but rather sign them on and bill them without their consent. And because the customer does not get to hear the caller tune, one hardly gets to know the service is on his or her phone and yet you keep paying for it every two weeks or every month.

The other annoying part is that the telcos and their VAS providers decide on which song to download for which customer; so, for instance, if you prefer a Diana Hamilton song to a Shatta Wale song, without your consent they can download a Shatta Wale song and put it on your phone as a caller tune. So, when people call you, they will hear a Shatta Wale song and that will create the impression that you are into Shatta Wale songs. Imagine if you are a pastor or a praise and worship leader like me, and your pastor or congregant calls you and hears Shatta Wale’s song – imagine the embarrassment.

I have had at least about 20 people complain to me that they have been signed on to caller tunes that they do not know anything about and they don’t even like the songs downloaded for them. I personally did a cursory check on contacts in my phonebook. When I call people and I hear a caller tune, I tell the person the song I heard and then ask if they subscribed to it.

In more than 90% of the cases, they tell me they had no idea any such song was playing to callers. Clearly, these are people who are being defrauded without their knowledge. My good friend and former colleague Cyrus D Johnson has an Absa Bank advert as the caller tune on his Vodafone line because he used to work there. But every month he gets a bill for some KiDi and Adina songs he never downloaded and does not know anything about. Clear fraud.

Nigeria lawsuit again MTN

Very often the telcos, in an attempt to absolve themselves, pass the buck to the VAS providers, claiming that these fraudulent looting subscriptions are executed by their VAS partners. But in Ghana, the law is very clear – that telcos are responsible for all paid subscriptions on their respective networks. So, if a telco chooses to cede the role of signing on subscribers to the VAS provider, legally, the telco assumes responsibility for whatever the VAS provider does.

This is why in Nigeria, several years ago, an MTN customer who was signed on to caller tunes without his consent, sued MTN and the courts ruled that indeed, MTN had no right to have signed him on to a caller tunes service without his consent. At the end of the day, the customer won the case and was awarded five million Naira (US$11,481 or GHS113,662). It was a small amount for MTN, but it proved that MTN was indeed engaged in fraud.

In Ghana, the law is very clear that for every single case of signing on to a VAS without the customer’s consent the offending telco is liable to a fine of not more than 5,000 penalty units or a five-year jail term. One penalty unit in Ghana is GHS12 so it comes to GHS60,000 for just one offense.

Multiply that by the number of customers they are exacting this fraud on and you are running into billions of Ghana cedis in fines. Indeed, the very fact that the law prescribes a jail term for the offense is evidence that it is a crime.

But it appears that, like in Nigeria, the Ghanaian regulator does not care about applying the law, so Ghanaians are left with the option of gathering our own evidence and going to court, with the hope that our law courts would uphold our cases and fine the defaulting telcos heavily and or jail their officials for fraud.

I look forward to that day when the ecosystem will be sanitized such that telcos and VAS providers will make ethical money while subscribers are allowed the true freedom to use their airtime the way they prefer, without some criminal-minded people coming up with fraudulent ideas to steal our airtime and force us to buy more airtime, so they will get richer while we get poorer.

On that note, I am launching phase two of the #StopTheAirtimeLoot campaign soon, and the focus is on LOOTING CALLERTUNEZ.

Stay tuned.

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