The communication guarantor fines TIM, Vodafone, Wind and FastWeb: they invoiced after the end of the contract
The Telecommunication Guarantor must intervene, and it is not the first time, to sanction telephone operators for their unfair practices. In this case, the sanctions were given by the mobile telephony giants: T IM, Vodafone, Wind and Fastweb .
Fines totaling 1 million euros were imposed on the four companies. According to the Authority, the telephone operators have implemented unfair practices in the management of terminations of fixed and mobile telephone users.
The Antitrust Authority fined the companies Vodafone SpA for 400 thousand euros, Wind Tre SpA for 300 thousand euros, Telecom SpA for 200 thousand euros and Fastweb SpA for 100 thousand euros. The Antitrust investigations made it possible to ascertain the illegitimate behavior of the four telephone operators in the management of terminations of fixed and mobile telephone users, even in the hypothesis of migration to another operator.
In particular, critical issues arose in the management of internal procedures for termination of users, which gave rise – starting at least from January 2020 – to situations of post-withdrawal billing or, in the event of migration, double billing by the user , which was unlawfully requested to pay the invoices of both the new and the previous operator.
According to the Authority, the unlawful continuation of invoicing – after the request for service termination – is attributable to anomalies and technical misalignments between the IT management systems of the internal process of each company, with respect to which the same, albeit to different extents have not adopted effective control mechanisms and timely intervention.
The Authority has acted in a correct and extremely necessary way to punish this illegitimate behaviour, but, at the same time, the sanctions it imposes are insufficient: how can two or three hundred thousand euros weigh on companies that invoice billions? The sanctioning system needs to be reviewed to make it more effective.
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The article The communication guarantor fines TIM, Vodafone, Wind and FastWeb: they billed after the end of the contract comes from Scenari Economici .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/il-garante-delle-comunicazioni-multa-tim-vodafone-wind-e-fastweb-hanno-fatturato-dopo-la-fine-del-contratto/ on Tue, 04 Apr 2023 08:00:02 +0000.