Mobile phone operators still sometimes fail to verify customers’ identity, offer access to itemised bills, or provide sufficient contractual information, according to a mystery shopper exercise carried out by the Malta Communications Authority.
The authority’s report, published on Monday, compares findings to a similar exercise from 2023, which had found a litany of shortcomings across Malta’s three mobile phone operators Go, Melita and Epic.
The report acknowledges “commendable progress” since the earlier exercise but notes that “various shortcomings” remain due to minor omissions, human errors, and inconsistencies in protocol adherence.
However, the report does not name individual operators, making it impossible to determine which of the three companies are responsible for each shortcoming.
For a start, the report says, two of the providers did not bother to ask to see an ID card when the mystery shopper was signing up for a service, while the third asked for identification at the signup stage but not when delivering a SIM card.
Meanwhile, one unnamed provider breached MCA regulations by restricting access to itemised bills, making them available only by email upon request instead of through the company website.
And two of the three companies still do not provide sufficient information about the quality of their service (such as initial connection time and call signalling delays) in their pre-contractual documents, the report says.
And pre-contractual documents were sometimes also marked by incorrect or missing information about monthly allowances, monitoring of service usage and balance of allowances, amongst other things.
The report also flags several other issues, including operators not always asking for customers’ consent over whether to include them in the directory, and sometimes asking customers to sign on a blank electronic device without providing clear information on what they are signing.
The report notes that the operators frequently pin the blame on sporadic “lapses” by their staff, rather than systemic failings, insisting that they are the result of “human errors or deviations from established protocols by providers’ representatives”.