MIIT: Telecom Companies Must Send Monthly Bills To Users Via SMS

It is no longer a secret that so many telecommunication companies impose all sorts of charges on its customers and this has forced some users to dump some carriers. Now, it appears that there is a solution to some of these spurious charges at least in China. Today, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) says that it is attaching great importance to the problems of unidentified deductions, spam messages and harassing calls for media reports and indirect marketing. It called on telecommunications enterprises to immediately correct the wrong charging behavior and instructed these companies to send billing information to users on a monthly basis by SMS from next month so that users can clearly understand the how their money is spent.

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said that thousands of users receive embarrassing telephone calls and in some cases, the users are charged a stipend for the unwanted call. MIIT also frowned at unsolicited SMS and pop-up messages from carriers which make some users to mistakenly subscribe for a service that they don’t need. MIIT has instructed some of its department through a special program to ensure that these companies strengthen communication services and resource management, control harassment of phone communication channels, and prevent communication resources from being used to harass people.

These departments will also check the business promotion behavior of merchants in various industries, and ratify marketing strategy to ensure that it will not be to detriment of the people. They are also tasked with monitoring and interception of harassing calls as well as giving early warnings to companies who violate the directives. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology stressed violators will be appropriately dealt with according to laws and regulations. 

This problem is not limited to China, it is a global issue with telecom companies. If MIIT can fully enforce curbing telecom companies behavior in China, it wouldn’t take long before other relevant bodies will follow the same path in other parts of the world.