MTN Mobile Money not reliable

I  am very disappointed with the MTN Mobile Money service operators. This is because I had wanted to transfer GH¢500 to a friend.  I gave the  money to  one of my colleagues in the office to send the money on my behalf with the person’s name and number.

The MTN Mobile Money operator mistakenly sent the money to a wrong number. We made the complaint to the Graphic Road branch  of MTN to one Margaret at 11 a.m. on Tuesday, the very day we sent the money. After 30 minutes, she assured us that the request had been  sent to the reversal team  for the transfer to be blocked within 24 hours.

Since we wanted to check on how far they had gone with the process, we collected Margaret’s number which she gave as 0241002077 and called her several times to check on how far she had gone with the process but she never picked the call, neither did she return it.  

We waited patiently in the hope that the problem would have been rectified but as of 11 a.m. the next day, no notification had been received to inform us about the issue.  I went back to the MTN  office to verify from them if they had been able to fix the problem, only to be told  by another lady at the office that the money had been withdrawn around 8 p.m. that very day.

This lady explained  that MTN did not have the right to block the person’s number  based on a directive from the Bank of Ghana because it infringed on the rights of the individual . Their job was to call the person and  if he or she admits that the money sent was a mistake then they could work to reverse  the transfer.

I believe that the MTN reversal team never worked on the problem and left me to my fate. Based on these facts I have come to the conclusion that the MTN Mobile Money is not reliable because human as we are, we can make mistakes and if the system does not have any reliable mechanism to rectify the problem, then customers stand to lose.  

I wish to humbly suggest to the management of MTN and other money transfer networks to take a second look at the whole process of mobile money service.    

Hannah A. Amoah,
 Accra.