MTN South Africa has been fined for lying about how it advertised its one-day data bundles.
MyBroadband says that an MTN customer named Christo Boshoff filed a complaint with the Advertising Regulatory Board (ARB) of South Africa. He said that MTN’s ads were unclear and often misled customers about how long their one-day data bundles would last.
Inside the MTN app, the one-day bundles are advertised, but there is no clear way to tell when they will expire.
The data bundle did not last for a day
According to the article, Boshoff bought a one-day 2.5GB bundle thinking it would last for 24 hours. However, it ran out before he thought it would.
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When he called the MTN customer support line, the representative informed him that the data would only be good for the day it was purchased. This means that the one-day data bundles will become invalid at 12:59 PM on the same day that they were purchased, regardless of when they were purchased.
There are a number of other significant mobile operators who also provide data bundles, but they only run till midnight. In most cases, they make it abundantly obvious that their daily bundles become invalid at midnight. For example, Vodacom calls these bundles “Until Midnight” bundles, while Cell C calls theirs “Till Midnight” bundles. The regulatory body came to the conclusion that MTN’s ad did, in fact, mislead consumers, which is against Clause 4.2.1 of Section II of the Code of Advertising Practice.
MTN had declined to communicate with the ARB when the case was initially brought. But the business has accepted the verdict and said it would ensure its future ads are clear of any ambiguity.
ARB explains the situation
The ARB outlined two distinct possibilities for what a consumer who purchases a one-day bundle would anticipate: that the bundle would become invalid at midnight or become invalid after 24 hours. According to the directorate’s assessment, either interpretation is within the realm of reasonable possibility. It was stated that some customers could comprehend that the time would run out at midnight, while others might have anticipated that it would last for 24 hours from the time of purchase. It was said that the customers’ expectation that it would be valid for 24 hours is technically wrong but that the expectation itself is not unreasonable.
The statement that Boshoff received from MTN’s assistance said that a day finishes at midnight, regardless of when the data bundle was purchased, as was noted by the ARB. It went on to say that MTN makes no effort to clear up the uncertainty and concluded that the company’s terminology is confusing and misleading.
In Nigeria, all of the telecommunications service providers, including MTN, provide 24-hour bundles that do not become invalid at the stroke of midnight on the same day that they are purchased.
About MTN
MTN Group Limited is a South African mobile telecommunications business operating in several countries across Africa and Asia. The company was formerly known as M-Cell. Johannesburg is the location of the company’s headquarters. MTN had 280 million members as of December 2020, making it the largest mobile network operator in Africa as well as the eighth-largest mobile network operator in the world. Even though the company does business in more than 20 countries, one-third of its income comes from Nigeria, where it has about 35% of the market.