National Communications Authority orders MTN to refund losses suffered by consumers over data bundle challenges

The NCA wrote to Ghana’s largest Mobile Network to make these demands.

The statement said “National Telecommunications regulator, the National Communications Authority (NCA) has directed mobile network operator, MTN Ghana to ensure the immediate resolution of the challenges with their billing system. MTN has further been directed to refund all losses suffered by affected consumers.”

This is coming after MTN customers could not buy data for the past two days from their mobile money wallet. Others saw a drastic reduction in their data bundles they purchased.

The NCA said customers of MTN complained to them over what they said was wrongful billing. Meanwhile, calls to MTN’s call centres were unsuccessful.

The regulator said that MTN informed its customers later about the challenges they were facing but failed to inform the Authority.

The NCA has therefore asked MTN to submit a detailed report on the incident to be sent to its offices by close of business Wednesday, December 4. It added that failure to do so will cause them to apply the appropriate sanctions.

The report is expected to include an explanation of why MTN did not inform the NCA of its challenge, the full nature of the issue, the impact of the challenge on MTN’s customers and remedial measures amongst others.

The NCA said they necessary measures will be taken to ensure the challenges do not recur.

On the compensation, the NCA directed that MTN should inform affected consumers of the package before its implementation.

However, before NCA asked MTN to compensate its customers, the Chief Executive Officer of MTN Selorm Adadevoh, said that the company had solved the challenges.

Mr Adadevoh said the challenges could be blamed on technical hitches in the implementation of new tariffs. He said that the affected customers would be compensated starting Tuesday evening.

“We have tried to resolve the issues associated with MoMo purchases and customers who made purchases and did not receive the data bundles have been refunded. We have also looked at the challenges with the MoMo functionality itself and the issue has been resolved. So, today if you go into the MoMo menu to buy a data bundle, that transaction should complete.”

“What we are also doing tonight is to reimplement what we had intended, and you should see some correction to data volumes tomorrow [Wednesday]. Customers should get the level of value that they were expecting, that implementation will happen tonight [Tuesday]. There are very specific bundles that customers have requested we bring back; the 3 cedi and the 10 cedi bundles are the two biggest ones that will be reintroduced tonight[Tuesday],” he added.