A member of the Techzim community reached out to us with a very strange and concerning problem. They had observed that their ZOL prepaid bundle was depleted after an electrical fault. Before the power outage, they had substantial data in their account and then there was nothing when power was restored.
The first thing that we thought was that someone had accessed their account remotely. Maybe there was someone else who had their credentials and could have accessed their account through “Fibroinks On The Go“. To this point, we were told that they live alone and no one else could have accessed their account.
Stranger still is that when they checked their usage history on the MyZOL app there were apps and services that they didn’t use. The user only has Apple devices and when they saw data usage from the Play Store they were alarmed.
What did ZOL customer support say about the depleted data?
They didn’t get much in the way of assistance from ZOL customer services. First, they were told that the customer services operator couldn’t see their usage history on their system and for whatever reason the conversation ended there.
It was unclear to the user if it was a network issue or if the operator ended the call. The user then called back and told another ZOL operator to compare the IP Addresses of the devices that usually use the network to the ones that accessed his account when there was an electrical fault. Sad to say they didn’t get a response to this request.
It gets worse…
The individual we spoke then put us in touch with someone else they know who experienced something similar. This case is a little worse because it happened to this individual twice. In the second case like in the first, there was no help from ZOL Customer Service.
Both individuals suspect that this is something that is happening in-house at ZOL. Because there is no one else who could have accessed their accounts besides the service provider. If it wasn’t someone within ZOL then:
“Who are these strangers with my personal information?? And why can’t ZOL account for them?”
ZOL’s response to our inquiry
As with anything of this nature we reached out to ZOL to explain how this could have happened. This is the response we got:
“Thank you for raising this matter with the ZOL team. ZOL Zimbabwe values customer feedback as it assists in improving our service delivery. ZOL Zimbabwe is also committed to being responsive to the needs and concerns of its customers or potential customers and to resolving customer complaints respectfully and timeously.
Without specific details relating to the matters raised, we cannot appropriately respond to your questions. Kindly furnish us with the contact details of the customers so that we can address their concerns.Pertaining to the concerns regarding data depletion after an electricity fault/outage, an electricity fault/outage cannot cause data usage on a customer’s account as the applications that track bandwidth usage are not affected by electricity fault/outages.”
ZOL
This response is a little weird because they could have easily asked if a complaint of this nature was logged. Whatever the problem may be might be something that ZOL management has been unaware of. Nonetheless, it is something they should dig into and find the route cause of.
After all, customers subscribe to ZOL expecting the best customer experience and service.
We are inclined to believe this happened
- The person who reached out is someone quite respected in our community and would have no cause to lie
- ZOL billing can go belly up and act crazy, we have seen it happen a few times. They once dished out free access to YouTube and other Google services for months!
So what happened next?…
We asked the person who reached out to us if they wanted us to share their details with ZOL as per the response we got. They agreed because what they wanted was to have the data they paid for back.
After a back and forth with ZOL, the ISP reimbursed them but said what caused the data to be depleted was a “technical issue”. As far as explanations go this doesn’t come close to what a customer needs to inspire confidence in ZOL’s services.
To make matters worse the “technical issue” is still there and this could happen again. The biggest issue of all is that this ZOL customer had to reach out to the media in order to get the problem solved. This is very worrying because you’d expect that a company like ZOL to give it’s customers the best possible customer services experience.
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11 comments
Do we actually have a regulatory board that governs whether when you buy let’s say the 8gig bundle from econet,you are actually given 8 gig. It is worrying to think that you might be told you received 8gig while in actuality you gt 6,or you buy 8 gig and your isp suddenly takes out 3gig. It’s actually strange that similar bundles from different isp don’t last the same amount of time e.g my econet 65mb whatsapp weekly would last only 2 or 3 days yet it didn’t do calls but my 70mb netone bundle lasted longer while I was doing whatsapp calls.
It’s called POTRAZ but they are in the pockets of ISPs with whom they spend time winning and dinning at useless seminars and functions. They often advocate for ISPs rather than be neutral Cheerfully asking for hikes without customer feedback.
Had a slightly similar experience using my Zol line on my mobile phone a few months back. Normally i last a full month on their 2Gb bundle without depleting it as i also have seperate wifi access elsewhere. On two seperate occasions,the 2Gb lasted less than a week. First occasion they checked and it was Windows Updates. I remembered i had used the phone to hotspot my laptop – which quietly ran its updates nonstop. Second time, they also told me of apps i never use on my phone. I also never hotspot any people. We fought a bit over this till we concluded it may still have been hotspotting people – unknowingly. When we use Share-it, it activates hotspot and i did remember using it a lot one day and leaving it active for hours. That sounded probable to me. Have not hotspotted the laptop since and have ensured to disable Share-It and the hotspot soon after use and havnt had this issue again.
Thinking 🤔 of it there’s a month I topped up my internet package 📦 to my surprise, data that would spend me a month was depleted in 2 days. It was so weird but now it makes sense. Also saw a WhatsApp group named Zol free data settings where some guys are selling so called Zol internet settings. I think that’s what’s happening. Wish Potraz would take a look into this.
This has happened to me on 2 seperate occasions. The second time i complained and complained but nothing ever came from it. Zol would actively dismiss my emails, cut the line off or hand me from one rep to another and pretend to be management when requested. 3 months of complaining and nothing came from it…. I have a background in computers so I know for a fact I never used the data, zol is definitely taking peoples data, I also noticed that at the end of every month the data was being used up as well right before the next billing period. This alone indicated that zol itself is aware of and is likely complicit l.
This is unlikely – what is more likely is your media feeds switched to FHD and started consuming more data.
Speaking from experience – when ZOL upgraded from 5mbps to 10mbps on capped links, people DID see their data being consumed faster. This wasn’t ZOL ‘stealing’ their data. This was their media sources – netflix/youtube/etc switching to a higher quality due to the increased bandwidth available.
Could their bundle have expired at a time between their Zesa outage? Bundles do expire.
I have had this happen to me. i lost about 2 gig after zol had its nation wide “fault”. it said we had used 2 gig of youtube data. but we were off most of the day. sometimes when you switch the router/modem off it takes off some data. we do try leave it on. I changed the passwords in case. when we first started with zol and they changed to current billing system our data amount kept jumping around. one day it would say 3 gig next it would say 10 gig. thankfully zol seemed to fix that on our modem. maybe its still buggy on others. they also were rude and said it wasnt their system. for those saying switch providers this has happened on telone adsl too.
In this case, the client at least could point out that it happened after a power outage. I went from from using 50GB in a month and a half, to now 150GB.
Multiple calls and chats with them have only been dropped, handed to someone else, or in the rare event that they respond I get “you shared your password with multiple people” or our system is having issues and we can’t check at the moment.
I ended up getting 25GB of netone onefi, and lo and behold, my 25 GB has lasted me almost a month with daily usage hotspotting the same devices that somehow were eating on some occasions 15GB a day.
I hope ZOL can get their things in order. From the time when they took away user access to the routers for “security reasons” their system has riddled with random suspicious issues. PS I’m an IT professional so, I’m aware of every video I open and what updates my system makes when it makes them.
My next plan, get an external router with logging for data. That way I can present empirical evidence to support my claims that their system has issues.
I have the same problem with ZOL right now. I have been calling them since yesterday. I bought data while out of the country for use when i get here as i was on my way. It was supposed to expire after a month. I checked about 10ndays later, all data was depleted. 00GB remaining. I then came back and tested the system again by buying 2GB. Same thing, data being depleted at a fast rate without me connected. I thought someone was hacking my account, so I called Zol and changed the WiFi name and password with about 250MB remaining. I left the house at around 12 pm, came back at 4pm, had 00GB, nobody at home, noone connected. What is going on with Zol? Client shortchanging?
This is still happening now. We were using data and no one was online. Yet Facebook kept going up in usage. It’s only my mother and I use Facebook and I don’t use the app. My mother’s phone was in an area of our house that our wifi doesn’t reach. When I reached out to zol suddenly zol portal was showing less on Facebook and more on YouTube. It’s continuing to use. I don’t know what else to do. Router doesn’t show anyone else but us. Please help with advice. Have changed passwords.