Korean Job Discussion Forums

[UknowsI]

I am a little upset with the service I have received from KT, so to vent I will now list every time I have been to the KT store:

1. I go to the KT store and buy a cellphone in the name of my Korean friend. The payments should be withdrawn automatically from my account, while I have to pay 100.000 won up front
2. I come and pay the 100.000 won payment
3. They ask me to come back in a couple of days to pick up my phone. I do, but it hasn't arrived yet so they ask me to come again the next day
4. I come again the next day, but my phone hasn't arrived, so they ask me to come the next day
5. I come the next day and get my phone
6. They never told me it came without a charger, so I had to get back and get a charger
7. A couple of months later they call me and tell me that my automatic billing doesn't work. I show up and they tell me I have to go to my bank and update my bank account information with my ARC information.
8. After I update my bank account I come back and they tell me everything is working perfectly.
9. It isn't working perfectly, they tell me to come again and I do. They tell me to say something else to my bank and I go to my bank and does this.
10. I come back to my KT store again and they tell me everything is working perfectly.
11. It is not working perfectly. This time I just go to the KT store and give them my Visa credit card information and ask them to simply charge my credit card. This works!
12. I get a new credit card and want to update the credit card number, so I go to the store. I was getting a new ARC at this moment and therefore didn't have my ARC. They tell me it is impossible to update my credit card number without my ARC, even though the cellphone is not in my name.
13. I come back with my new ARC. Then they tell me it's impossible to change the credit card information from their computer. I have to go to the main office.
14. I go to the main office. This time I bring my Korean friend and we decide to change the owner of the phone to my name instead of her name at the same time as registering my new number.
15. Apperently this didn't work. I get a warning that if I don't pay right away it will damage my credit rating. I go to the store and pay in cash, but they tell me I should go to my bank and change my bank account information so they can charge me automatically again. They tell me that my new credit card is refusing the payments.
16. I go to my bank and then come back to the KT store. They tell me everything will be fine now.
17. I go home, but the next day I found out that they charged my credit card even though I had paid in cash. I now go back to the KT store to get my money refunded. After a long while and many phone calls they give me the money.
18. This weekend I got a letter in the mail telling me that unless I pay by thursday, my Korean friend's credit rating will be hurt and they will terminate my contract. I check the emails they have sent me carefully, and notice that they have sent me 2 identical emails every month since I changed the name of the owner. They have charged both me and my friend every month for the same phone number! But I had of course only been paying one of the bills. Tomorrow I'm going back to try to fix this mess.

I feel like I am a fairly patient guy, but the last couple of visits have really started to push my buttons, and when I received the last letter yesterday I would go so far as to say I got a little angry.

The store should have been like this:
1. Pick a cell phone and give them my credit card (or other billing information)
2. Pick up the phone

I can understand 1 or 2 more stops just because I'm a foreigner, but having to visit them 18 times in 1 and a half year is ridiculous.

EDIT: When I come to think of it, I went there once to get them to tell me how to transfer MP3 files to my phone. They couldn't help me with that even though it was the reason why I chose the phone model I chose. So I guess I have been there one more time.

[kprrok]

Your first and biggest mistake was putting it in your friend's name. You should have just put it into your name and then you probably wouldn't have had many of these problems. You can't really blame KT for your mistake here.

[UknowsI]

[nautilus]

[Smee]

Just go through LG.

No deposit at the beginning, you can do it in your name, and you get bills mailed to you ech month in English.

But, LG does suck because they won't give internet to foreigners b/c they're afraid we'll run away. But LG Telecom was fine.

[debinoxford]

Would I be able to get a cellphone from LG immediately after arriving in Korea? I get in thursday night and would really like to get a phone sorted Friday.

[kprrok]

[CentralCali]

Not only was he misinformed, apparently he was badly advised on top of that. A few years ago, it came out that fronting for someone else to get credit is illegal in Korea and a cell phone account is a credit account.

[nautilus]

At the time, you had to have a Korean credit card to be issued a cellphone in your own name.
And no banks were granting credit cards to foreigners who worked in hogwons. Even if you worked for a company, you still had to pay a hefty deposit to get a card.
Even with a credit card I still would have had to have paid an exorbitant deposit on the phone itself.
I had no credit card so by far the easiest option was to get a Korean person to sign for it.
I had to do the same if i had wanted to join any Korean websites.
I had to do the same if i had wanted to buy anything online.
I had to do the same if i had wanted to be able to send emails to Koreans. You got it. Korean email servers didn't accept foreign emails at that time either. I could not send a reply to any hottie who emailed me with a normal yahoo account. They wouldn't recieve it. Romance closed.
I had to do the same if i had wanted to make reservations of any kind.
I had to do the same for anything that required a Korean ID number.

I think you'll find that most foreigners took the same route back then. To do anything at all in this country you had to be a sort of dependent child of the nearest korean friend you happened to make.
Things are easier now I guess. You lucky newbies have far less hassle nowadays.

[CentralCali]

When was "at the time"? I signed up with a Korean e-mail site (Daum) back in 2005 using my ARC number. I also signed up for Internet and phone service with KT using the same ARC number.

Yes, there are bigoted jerkish outfits here that illegally discriminate against foreigners. On the other hand, there are outfits that recognize that our money is just as good as a Korean's money.

[kprrok]

I can't say you're wrong in any of this, because I have no idea when "that time" was for you. I know that in 2004, I got all set up with KT using my ARC, my bankbook and my US check card. For the first year, I paid monthly at the bank but then got it to auto withdrawl sometime in late 2005/early 2006.

In early 2005, I signed up for hanmail via Daum using my ARC and my phone number to verify my ID. I DID have to have a Korean help me read the pages to find the info I needed, but it was all in my own name.

Korean credit cards are useless to me since I have to pay the bill at the end of the month, I may as well just use cash. I've since changed my mind and now have one, IN MY NAME.

Reservations? Like with Korean Air? No problems with that. I used the English site as far back as 2004 to book flights or just went to the office near me and got the same deals. No Korean needed for that.

The only thing I can definitely say you're correct about is the "anything that needs a Korean ID number" part. Of course you'd need a Korean for that as you aren't Korean and don't have one.

I'd say overall, you were mis-lead, ill-advised, or possibly just too lazy to figure out how to do it on your own. You gotta sleep in the bed you made.

[UknowsI]

I'm not saying I handled the situation perfectly. But even as an ignorant customer I feel like it should be unnecessary to go through this many steps. Most of the visits is simply because the person working at the store has no idea what he or she is doing.

I went to the bank today and they told me that it was a gap period between what I had paid for the old account and what I had paid for the new account and that this was why I got a bill for the old account too. However, they could have mentioned this the last 4 times I visited their store, and since the old account also have the billing information for automatic payment both from my Korean bank account and from my credit card, it wasn't necessary for me to show up at all.

Now they are telling me that everything is working and that they are withdrawing the money correctly from my Korean bank account. Last time I checked I was charged my credit card for my phone bill, but that was a little while ago so they might have changed it. I'm still wondering if they have got it right this time. Anyone wants to bet how long it goes until I have to visit them again? I guess 2 or 3 months.

[nautilus]

[kprrok]

[nautilus]