Vodafone springs prepay cellphone : export scamsters

Friday 23rd February 2001

By Rob Hosking

Quick-thinking Vodafone customers are buying its phones in bulk and flogging them off overseas, the telco revealed yesterday.

And industry sources suggest Telecom has also been on the receiving end of the practice, although the company denied that yesterday.

The Vodafone mobile handsets wound up in Fiji in a reselling operation that Vodafone now believes it has stopped.

The reseller operation was based on New Zealand's highly competitive mobile carriers selling the mobile handsets at prices below many other countries.

Resellers would buy up the handsets in bulk and export them. The problem came to Vodafone's attention when it noticed a considerable discrepancy between the number of handsets sold and the number of handsets activated.

The company would not give any figures on the extent of the operation but corporate communications executive Alison Sykora said it had been enough to justify the firm taking action.

Vodafone now sells the handsets and recharge cards separately, and has also made it technically impossible for users to use different pre-paid SIM cards with different mobile phones.

"Also, we had been running an offer where users would get $100 with the phone, and we changed that to $20 already loaded on to the SIM card and a further $30. However, in order to qualify for that extra $30 people have to fill in a survey card."

The price of those handsets has also been raised. Other measures had also been taken, she said, but the company was keeping those secret for security reasons.

Meanwhile, Telecom said it had no knowledge of any similar operation on its prepaid phones.

Industry sources suggest a not insignificant number of Telecom prepaid handsets are winding up in China and South Korea - both of which have carriers which operate mobile networks using the same Amps standard that Telecom Mobile uses.

However, Telecom says this is unlikely.

"No one I've spoken to here is aware of Telecom mobile prepaid phones being bought domestically and sold overseas," Telecom spokesman Glenn Sowry said.

Vodafone is seen as the more likely target of such an operation as its GSM network is more widely used around the world. Telecom's revenue from mobiles has dropped an average of 28% per customer for the last half year.

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