Telkomsel to take legal action against debtors
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)