Telstra does my head in

Telecomms & technology

You would not believe the embarrassing stupidity of Telstra. It is amazing beyond words.

Think of someone you revere and respect. Now imagine them acting like blithering idiots. You will soon wonder how someone so talented can be so brainless. This is what I have to contend with when I look at the size and might of Telstra, and reconcile the fact that their actions floor me. They knock me out with their utter stupidity and sheer mindless protocols that I find embarrassing because I have to imagine humans within Telstra going to work each day, sitting at their desk, being utterly and completely without brainpower. And then I wonder how that company functions?



I have been a Telstra client for over ten years. I had always made a point of noting that I do not wish to receive any newsletters from Telstra. I just do not have time to read ad hoc letters and promotions. So, for ten years, I have managed this quite well. Then, one day, out of the blue, I received this newsletter. How did Telstra decide to over-ride my preferences, and to ignore all that I had requested, and just disrespect and disregard our agreement? Never mind, we can say that it was a computer error. Let’s blame the technology. Sorry and all that. Okay. End of story. Forgiven. Not a massive problem. There was an ‘unsubscribe’ button. All I had to do was to opt-out, even thought I had never opted-in, and specifically asked to never opt-in. Forgiven.

So I pressed the ‘unsubscribe’ button, and what transpired just did my head in. The opt-out screen said, ‘We’re sorry to hear that you do not wish to receive email marketing from Telstra. To opt-out, complete the form below and click ‘Submit”…’ It then showed this screen below, and asked for the full name, date of birth, etc.

With scams and fraud and identity-theft being one of the biggest problems of the on-line world, this question from Telstra is completely unreasonable. A corporation of that size ought to know better about conditioning the community into divulging such information. A date-of-birth is a vital piece of information, and should not be submitted so casually. Scammers could easily send out emails, pretending to be from banks and telcos, and making it easy to unsubscribe, asking for the date of birth. With fraud so rife, it is crazy. I had never opted-in, so why put the onus on me to go through all these hoops to unsubscribe? There is no way that I am going to enter my date of birth into a form that I never really wanted in the first place. I just wanted Telstra to leave me alone. Besides, look at the combination of data: they want my title, first name, last name, email address and date of birth. Wow, that is a good start for a hacker or identity-thief. Why does Telstra need to know my full name? They are sending a letter to my email. Who cares what my name is. Sure they can give me reasons, but they have no right to be arguing about the ‘good reasons’ that suit them, when there are very good reasons why they should not be asking such questions in the first place!

What is a customer supposed to do? The bureaucracy of Telstra is so daunting that the customer has to comply with this risky request and expose themselves to ID theft. But, how would a customer know if that newsletter was really from Telstra? We must advise all users to never divulge that kind of information. So how can we educate a community when we keep confusing them? In the end, the customer would have to call Telstra, waste up to one hour, to speak with someone overseas who will no doubt not know what the call is about, and frustrate the customer by regurgitating policies and procedures until the client screams at the poor untrained clueless operator and hangs up. I am very busy. I do not wish to receive newsletters because I do not have time. This means that I do not have time to protest about these matters. Yet, sadly, it is my duty, as it is all our duty, to speak-up when we see potential dangers. I had no choice but to follow this up. What transpired was even more proof that Telstra has zero clue about security and identity theft.

I felt it my duty to inform Telstra of its stupid methods, so I went on-line to submit a complaint form.

It seems that one cannot complain to Telstra unless one divulges the account details. This is absurd. I just want to highlight something to them. I want to tell Telstra that they must not send out newsletters whose opt-out procedures request private data, because scammers can start doing this, and tricking clients left, right, and centre. The Australian Taxation Office never sends out such stupid emails. Yet, some clever scammer sent out a perfect replica of an ATO email asking people to enter their details to claim their tax refund etc. The poor tax office had to contend with confused clients who were duped. And the reason that the tax office had that problem, which was not of their own making, was due to the fact that silly organisations like Telstra and the Commonwealth Bank and St George Bank and American Express, all engage in hideous practices that put clients at risk.

In this form, Telstra wants the date of birth and the ABN when clients submit anything to do with an account. I do not understand how they can ask for a date of birth in relation to a company? That’s another long story. Meanwhile, I filled in the form and I only submitted information marked with a red asterisk. You might be jumping the gun here by advising me to just submit the form without my DOB, because the DOB is not a mandatory field. This is not true, as I soon found out. More about this below, but first, this is what I wrote to Telstra, trying to do them a favour, and trying to highlight to them an important matter that affects them and all their clients. I wrote, ‘…To unsubscribe, your page asks me to fill in enough details that a Phisher or scammer would ask for. Are you really sending this out and if so, you must stop it immediately. It goes against what we are trying to teach everyone not to do, due to internet scams. You must never ask such questions for a simple thing to unsubscribe. Get your security team onto this or ask them to call me so that I can enlighten them as to why this is stupid and harmful to all concerned. [I provided the Telstra link here]. Thank you. And by the way, please unsubscribe me! I will not fill out such information. And prove to me where and when I, all of a sudden, just opted in?’

You would think that someone read that and took a keen interest. Sadly, after the September 11 terrorist attacks on the USA in 2001, the US Government realised that a range of departments do not communicate. Alarm bells would ring in one department, but the channels were blocked, depriving other agencies from knowing about the dangers of certain terrorist cells. The same issue is afflicting Telstra. What more does someone have to do to warn them about a clear danger or an obvious problem? Their operators seem to have no idea about the real world. Their number-one priority, it seems to me, is to open emails from clients, and shoot back a question.

Oh, I long for the day when someone, anyone, from any organisation, can just take the query and act upon it. These help-desk people and online responders delight in answering a question with a question. No matter what you write, they just shoot the email back at you, ignoring its contents, and ticking it off as one more thing that they had done to justify their salary. They get paid by the number of tickets they touch, not by the number of tickets they actually resolve.

Anyway, I tried to tell them. If the people receiving my note did not understand it, they should have sent it to a senior person who might have known better. Alas not. They returned my query with a set of questions, as you can see in this email below, which, first of all, does not allow me to respond by email. Don’t you just hate it when these large corporations send out emails and say, ‘Do not respond to this email’. What is that all about? A telco who sells internet bandwidth for emails and communications, communicates with the customer via an email and says, you cannot respond via email. Oh grow up!

"I was complaining about Telstra asking for private information when trying to opt-out of a newsletter to which I had never opted-in. Telstra responds by saying, '...so we can bar premium sms and value added services on your account.' It proceeds to ask me for my driver's licence number and account password! It does my head in."

I was warning Telstra about a procedure that is utterly risky for them and their clients. Yet, this was the response from Telstra, completely off the wall. 100% irrelevant. 1000% not what I asked. 10,000% nothing to do with the price of fish. And 100,000% not even within the same galaxy of what I was trying to warn them about. Here is what they wrote:

Dear Nader,

Thank you for your email dated 24/09/2009 regarding third party charges.

Please provide us the following information, so we can bar premium sms and value added services on your account.

Mobile Number
Account Password
Date of Birth
Australian License Number

I started out by refusing to give my date of birth, and now they want my password and my driver’s licence number! And I cannot even respond to this person. No phone number! Telstra cannot communicate with me to hold a conversation. Everything has to be done in tickets, and never can two people speak about anything. How pathetic. So large yet so distant!

So I left it at that. I cannot be sucked into their docility and putridity. I have a life to live.

Lo and behold, someone sent to me a survey, asking if I would like to rate my recent experience with Telstra. Although unconvinced that my involvement in their survey would be of any use, I succumbed, out of duty. I must take every avenue to be a good community citizen and help that organisation to stop breeching codes of conduct that give scammers an advantage. They never responded. Organisations think that surveys are a one way communications process. That is a childish attitude.