It is increasingly becoming clearer and clearer that telcos and their third-party partners in the value-added service (VAS) industry are bent on taking full advantage of customers’ ignorance, addictions and mistakes to loot their airtime.
In the course of this noble campaign, #StopTheAirtimeLoot, we have showed that if customers dial *175# on MTN, *463# on Vodafone and *100# on AirtelTigo, they might find loads of paid-for VAS (otherwise known as Value Depleting Scheme – VDS) running on their phone without their knowledge and consent. At least one person reported seeing as many as 12 of such subscriptions on his phone, while others found between 1 and 7 subscriptions.
Find some screenshots below:
The main airtime looting VASs on MTN were GAMES PORTAL, VUCLIP GAMES, HEALTH AND FITNESS, WEATHER REPORT, SELFIE STAR, NEVARA, KIDZONE, and others. On Vodafone, we found PREMIUM TRIVIA, PERSONALITY TEST, MSCORER, MUSICAPP, GAMES24PRO, and BRAINWAVE GAME. Initially we did not find much on AirtelTigo, but later, some AirttelTigo customers reported seeing several of such services on their phones as well.
As pointed out in the first article, dubbed “Telcos looting our airtime as NCA looks on?”, telcos and their VAS partners tend to make the excuse that customers do sign on to these services by themselves, only to come later and complain about their airtime being looted.
PORN SITES Story
In line with that ‘flimsy’ argument, a gentleman who goes by the name Eli Kem on Facebook, and said he was a former MTN staff, mounted a strong challenge to our article saying that subscribers just want to shift blame on telcos because it was convenient. In his attempt to prove that customers actually do sign on to VAS by themselves, he made a revelation that exposed the unethical practices of telcos and their VAS partners in the way they take advantage of people’s ignorance and addictions to sign them on to VAS without their knowledge.
Eli Kem narrated how a customer once complained of airtime loot and when they checked, they realized he actually visited a PORN SITE and clicked on a link there, through which he was signed on to a paid-for VAS on MTN.
He told this story, with the intent to defend the telco/VAS players and expose a customer’s improper behavior, which led to him signing on to a VAS on MTN. What he failed to realize was the bigger problem of a whole corporate organization and its partners who profess integrity, reliability, high ethical standards and all, using a PORN SITE as a channel to advertise VAS weblinks with the intent of taking full advantage of the porn addicts.
It more worrying that a respected company like MTN and or its VAS partner would go through the whole process of CONTACTING A PORN SITE and PAYING THEM MONEY TO POST A LINK TO AN SMS BASED SERVICE ON MTN, so that unsuspecting visitors to the PORN SITE will get signed on.
PornHub Report
A recent porn viewership report by PornHub indicated Ghana is second in the world when it comes to watching porn on that site. So, the telco and its VAS players know exactly what they were doing advertising VAS weblinks on PORN SITES.
Since I started my website, techgh24.com, I have had three gambling sites abroad offer me money to post links of their mobile games on my site, but I turned down the juicy offer because gambling could be an addiction and I didn’t feel it was ethical for me to make money off someone else’s addiction. It is not as if I make millions from my site. I am just a beginner, but at least I have integrity. But here we have telcos and VAS players already making millions and they still want to cash in on people’s addictions.
It is bad enough for people to be addicted to porn. But it is most unethical and highly unprofessional for a whole corporate organization to take full advantage of such addictions to sell paid-for SMS services and make money.
Overseas VAS Players
I am fully aware that the telcos often use VAS players abroad, hired by their mother companies to provide VAS across all their footprints in Africa. These overseas VAS players have no respect for the laws of Ghana, i.e. the Unsolicited Electronic Communications Code of Conduct. This is why the law places the responsibility of seeking customers’ express CONSENT right at the doorstep of the local telcos. So, if a VAS player falls foul of the law, the telcos that hired it will be held fully responsible.
It means whatever onboarding practices the VAS players abroad are engaged in, it is because the telcos are not keeping the gates, and there is a reason for it. When the VAS players loot our airtime, they share the loot with the telcos; and the telcos actually get a lion’s share of the loot, so it is actually in their interest for the VAS players to engage in more value depleting schemes to loot more airtime. The only people who draw value in VAS services are the telcos and their VAS partners. For most part, the targeted customers only lose airtime for no value derived.
Confirmation Message
There is some good news, however. Since the start of the #StopTheAirtimeLoot campaign, there have been signs of some telcos changing their onboarding practices to ensure they get the express CONSENT of subscribers before signing them on. As the pictures below would show, even if one subscribes to a service deliberately or by mistake, they will send you a confirmation message to either “Accept” or “Reject” the service before they actually sign you or not. There must be evidence of your selection before their next line of action. If you select “Reject”, which is number 2, the service will and should not be provided.
This is what the telcos should have been doing to protect their subscribers all these years. The law actually enjoins them to protect subscribers all the way. You often find telcos applying two-step and multi-step processes in almost everything to protect their network and sometimes subscribers. But when it comes to VAS and the schemes to loot airtime, they just depend on a supposed onetime click on a weblink or onetime subscription to a short code. In the case of short codes, they even provide and charge you for additional services on a short code even though you may have specifically subscribed to just one service.
We want to believe that the changes being seen, particularly on MTN, will also reflect on all the other networks. We also want to believe that these changes are because we called the NCA’s attention to the loot and NCA has intervened at the backdoor to ensure some sanity. NCA needs to do more by thoroughly investigating the onboarding practices of the telcos and their VAS players, and give subscribers a full picture of what we are dealing with, so that we will be on a high alert.
ICH to the rescue?
Secondly, the Interconnect Clearinghouse (ICH) also has a mandate to be the single point of access between VAS players and telcos. So, the VAS players who sit abroad and practice into Ghana through their unethical and illegal onboarding practices, must also go through ICH to reach subscribers. The ICH, in that sense, will ensure that every single VAS has fulfilled all the regulatory requirements before its gets to the subscriber.
The second leg of that situation is that telcos themselves do offer VAS directly to subscribers as well, without necessarily using third-party partners. So, the law must require the telcos to separate their VAS operations from their core services and channel that through ICH before getting to subscribers. This is possible in the same way telcos have been able to separate their mobile money operations into companies on their own under a different set of management. They did separate the tower companies too before finally handing them over to third parties. VAS should also be separate and channeled through ICH.
The ICH has, just in September this year, started moving 100 per cent of in-country interconnect traffic and is gearing up to fulfill its other mandates under the law. These include connecting international gateways to the telcos and also VAS players to the telcos. Subscribers are hopeful that this will happen sooner than later, to ensure some sanity in the VAS space.
In the meantime, I am still waiting on MTN to refund my 78-year-old mother’s over GHS40 that they siphoned through a “value deplete scheme” called VUCLIP GAMES, which is of no relevance to the old lady and MTN does not have any evidence to show that they sought her consent and she confirmed she wanted the service. Till, date, how she was signed on to that service remains a mystery.
