Irancell Gate Corruption Case: In the Name of the People, Benefiting Mobile Operators

The Irancell Gate Corruption Case: Account Fabrication to Receive Money from the Government

The Irancell Gate corruption case emerged after the disclosure of letters from Rightel and Irancell. The Iran Gate anti-corruption team found the matter suspicious. Field investigations conducted on the statistical community we interacted with confirmed the suspicion that Irancell engaged in account fabrication to present invoices and receive money from the Ministry of Communications.

Low-usage subscribers, whose data usage on their phones was less than 1 GB, were billed for the entire purchased package.

To simplify understanding, let’s use a short example: Suppose you are an Irancell subscriber and at the beginning of the month, you purchased a 10 GB internet package. During the usage period, your data consumption was 1 GB. At the end of the period, Irancell declares your total data usage as 9 GB.

It might seem unimportant, and you might think the cost has been paid and it doesn’t matter. However, given the current conditions in the country and internet restrictions, operators have found ways to receive money by presenting invoices for foreign traffic. For instance, there has been a recent discussion that due to internet filtering, users have activated services to bypass filtering with domestic CDNs, resulting in operators incurring losses.

In the current situation, considering the severe financial deficits and the deep recession, this action by operators and the Ministry of Communications’ threat of operator bankruptcy is profiteering at the expense of people’s lives and wealth and encroachment on public funds.

• Is Rightel sending letters to pave the way for Irancell’s account fabrication?
• What is the extent of Irancell and Rightel’s account fabrication to receive money from the government?
• Is this the first time this has happened? There are reports confirming the repetition of this issue.
• Is the Ministry of Communications unaware of this issue, or is this a coordinated account fabrication within the agencies to circumvent the law?