I haven’t availed any postpaid plans from any telecommunication company but few of my friends did. Those who happened to subscribed to Globe services gained that feeling of dismay and anguish because of the hidden charges that were added on their bills. Fortunately, none of them received a bill of over Php 3 million pesos like the case of Elmer De Jesus De Guzman!
(Photo Credit: The Filipino Times and to the real owner of the bill; Mr. Elmer De Jesus De Guzman)
Before I go to the main topic, I would like to emphasize that hidden charges are for real. I witnessed a friend who suffered the same problem before. She subscribed to a postpaid plan with a handset. On a certain billing period, she was just expecting around Php 3,000 of charges but she was shocked when she was billed for about Php 8,000.00. That convinced her to just opt out on her postpaid plan. There are a lot of related incidents like this and others may even experienced the worse.
Take for example the case of Mr. Elmer De Jesus De Guzman. His bill was uploaded on Facebook and displayed on the image above. He is a subscriber of Globe Telecoms and a travel agency proprietor. He received a bill from Globe stating that he owed Php 3,272,623.38.
According to De Guzman, the bill was from his “data roaming charges” for his recent trip to Dubai. Though he availed Globe's “Bridge DataRoam Unlimited UAE for 55USD (5 days)” which reflected and charged on the same bill, Globe Telecoms charged him their regular and extravagant data roaming rate instead.”
The Facebook photo garnered a lot of shares and netizens stormed his post to provide comments as well as similar horror stories of inflated data roaming charges when postpaid users forgot to turn off the service on their smartphones. The number of shares doubled after about three hours.
Whether or not the excessive bills is the consequence of the subscriber's carelessness to turn off their data roaming or packet data settings, it is still the responsibility of Telcos to inform the users if they still want to have roaming services by sending them notifications. Globe loves to send useless notifications but why not send one to inform if users would still want to continue to use the roaming service?
Globe Telecoms should not allow this thing to happen and earn millions of pesos from their loyal customers’ carelessness.