Don’t let WASPs sting your mobile airtime

Writer Raphael da Silva

If you feel that you have an unusually high phone bill or that your airtime disappears as quickly as you load it, then maybe you are being charged for premium WASP (Wireless Applications Service Providers) services that you didn’t ask for or perhaps inadvertently subscribed to.

This was the experience of Hermanus resident, Clare Wise de Wet, who, after visiting and sending various emails to her mobile provider, is being credited with airtime to the value of R1 110 “as a once-off gesture of goodwill for the WASP charges” according to an email she received from Vodacom.

“I could not work out why I was going through about R500 airtime a month when I rarely make phone calls. When I went into the Vodacom shop to enquire about changing to a post-paid contract, as clearly something was amiss with the pre-paid service, the sales assistant sent an SMS to 31050, typed in STOP ALL, and sent it” said Clare in a Facebook posting on The Village NEWS - All Over Overberg.

“To my horror, a text message came back stating that I'd been unsubscribed from 'BeFit' and, the next day, another text came in for 'QZtech'. The worst part was being told that I had "accidentally" subscribed to these things, which I absolutely did not, and then being made to feel like an idiot when I insisted there was no way I would do this,” said Clare in the posting.

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