Telkomsel to take legal action against debtors
JAKARTA (JP): Private cellular operator PT Telkomsel will take legal action against subscribers who do not pay their bills, the company's executive said yesterday.
Telkomsel Director, Hulman Sidjabat, said that unpaid bills were not only owed by individuals but also well-organized institutions.
He said his company, which runs the global system for mobile communications (GSM) service, had also cooperated with the police to deal with such big debtors.
"We are still tracking a possible involvement of criminal syndicates in unpaid bills," he told reporters.
He said that uncollected or unpaid bills was a major headache for cellular operators. "Fixed telephone operators can easily find customers failing to pay their bills and block the lines but not for cellular operators."
The syndicates usually use fake names when buying their subscriber identity module (SIM) cards from cellular operators, he said, adding that they also sold the cards to other people.
The cellular operators could not charge either the buyers or the sellers due to the fake names and addresses they used, he said.
SIM cards are necessary to operate GSM handsets for local and international calls.
But Sidjabat refused to disclose the amount of the uncollected bills.
Analysts estimated the amount of unpaid bills to the country's cellular telephone operators could reach billions of rupiah.
The government has suggested cellular operators join hands to combat bad debtors by, for example, exchanging lists of the bad debtors and issuing a blacklist for them.
The increase in the number of uncollected bills is partly a result of fiercer competition among the country's cellular services.
There are about 900,000 cellular users in Indonesia which apply three systems: GSM, AMPS and NMT, run by seven operators.
Fake identification is the main mode of cheating GSM operators as the system is immune from cloning which is usually used to cheat AMPS operators.
Police said Wednesday they had arrested two people for allegedly copying 369 mobile phone numbers under the Advanced Mobile Phone Service (AMPS) system. They entered the number in their own phones before selling them, usually at very cheap prices.
The two people were estimated to have raised more than Rp 18 million (US$6,000) from the sale of the illegal phones.
Telkomsel's president, Koesmarihati Sugondo, said yesterday that her company was more cautious in receiving new subscribers.
"We have hired special 'squads' to survey new users, checking whether the addresses are hard to be found.
"In some cases, we admit that Telkomsel has failed to send billing charges to our customers on time. But starting in November we plan better billing delivery," she said. (icn)