Telkomsel or not Telkomsel

On March 28, I bought a Kartu Halo handphone card (No.823239) from a Telkomsel promotion stand in Bintaro Plaza. I produced all required identification and took my new card home, assured by the sales staff that it would be active that evening. In the afternoon of March 29, the card was still inactive and I received a phone call from Telkomsel informing me that I needed to send them a reference letter from my company before they could activate my card. On March 31, I faxed a reference letter to Telkomsel. Nothing happened.

After a long series of phone calls to Telkomsel, suffering the "being put on hold and then being cut off" routine and being passed from supervisor to supervisor, I waited and waited and two weeks later I'm still waiting.

According to Telkomsel, the stand where I bought the card was, in fact, a dealer and that dealer has not passed on my registration data to their validation department yet. Since the stand was manned by staff wearing Telkomsel uniforms, sitting in a handphone-shaped box the size of a bus emblazoned with Telkomsel's logos, you'd have to be a psychic to know that you are, in fact, buying from a dealer and not directly from Telkomsel.

Telkomsel's final response on the matter has been to divorce themselves of all responsibility, but they did make the helpful suggestion that I should contact the dealer. I have already tried, but the dealer in the plaza has changed (according to the Telkomsel girls at the stand who are not really Telkomsel girls, if you see what I mean).

Telkomsel boasts about its customer care in their magazine, but it would appear to be no more than an empty lie.

Name and address

known to the editor