Justin Pearce
Telkom has taken to barring certain phone lines to international calls, in an attempt to “protect” its clients from fraudsters.
A Johannesburg Telkom official admitted this to the Mail & Guardian after the newspaper was approached by a telephone user who found certain international numbers were blocked to her after hours — even though Telkom’s head office denies knowledge of the practice.
The M&G was alerted to the problem by Michelle Aarons, a book editor who lives in Parktown and whose job often involves phoning outside the country after hours. An attempt to reach London resulted in a recorded message telling her the line was blocked and she must place her call through the operator. The operator told her this would involve a R5 surcharge.
Aarons says when she phoned Telkom in Johannesburg, officials had told her of people who were tapping into Telkom lines so they could make calls on other people’s accounts. These people were then charging customers — mostly foreign visitors and illegal immigrants — one rand a minute to make international calls, a substantial saving on the rate charged by Telkom.
She was told the racket was linked to certain taxi services which ferried callers in from suburban hotels to make their cut-price calls on the illegal lines. In order to stop the scam, Telkom was blocking calls from numbers starting with 643 — an exchange that covers Hillbrow and part of Parktown — to central London and certain central African countries. According to the official, many of the illegal callers were immigrants with contacts elsewhere in Africa.
Telkom’s customer care manager Theo Theron told the M&G he did not know anything about Telkom barring calls in this way. He said a customer who had a problem with an international call could place it through the operator — a call placed manually did not incur a surcharge, but there was a minimum charge equivalent to a three-minute call, he said.
However, one of the officials whom Aarons had contacted confirmed certain lines had been prevented from making calls to certain foreign destinations, for customers’ own good.
“Why do they come and complain to us when we’re doing it as a service to them?” he grumbled.
The official said tapping into a phone line was easy: “it only takes a piece of copper wire”.
Itemised telephone accounts are only available to users connected to new electronic exchanges, and many numbers in Hillbrow and Parktown are still on old-style systems.