Subscribers of MTN Ghana network have exposed what they describe as a scam by the giant telecom provider when it claimed it was gifting all its subscribers two gigabytes of data last week.
Subscribers had lost data last week and were virtually shut out of the world wide web due to what MTN claimed was a break in its undersea fibre-optic cables in Europe.
To compensate subscribers for the data losses and inconvenience caused, MTN announced all its subscribers will be given free two gigabytes of data.
However, technology-savvy subscribers quickly discovered the gift was a scam because MTN gave the data a two-day expiry date and also substantially slowed down the data speed to subscribers on the 2 gigs.
According to extremely peeved subscribers of the network, the scheme was hatched to prevent subscribers from using up the 2 gigs before it expired and reverted back to MTN.
On subscriber simply known as “Martin” posted on Ghanaian social media that he put the scam hypothesis to test and it confirmed the suspicions.
According to Martin, the 2gig data gift from MTN was functioning at a slow speed of 25 kilobytes per second (kbps), but as soon as he bought regular data, the speed jumped to 370 kbps
“We the people of Ghana are not ignorant about your strategy.
You are a disgrace and a cheat for stealing our bundle and refunding us 2GB with a capped speed of 25kbps . As soon as I topped up my speed rose to 370kbps. I urge the National communications Authority (NCA) to put you to order on this senseless action,” Martin challenged MTN in an online petition that was copied to the NCA.
MTN is Ghana’s biggest mobile telephony service provider with approximately 20 million subscribers.
However, in the past couple of years, subscribers have consistently complained about bad services, including hidden charges and scam data services.