Ringing Bells, the maker of the world’s cheapest smartphone Freedom 251, is being accused of fraud and non-payment of dues and abrupt termination of contract by call center service provider Cyfuture.
Noida based Cyfuture is a vendor of Ringing Bells and was contracted by the company to provide call-center support in India. The company has alleged that Ringing Bells has not fulfilled payments due to them. The call center even said that in order to provide uninterrupted services, it hired a team of more than 100 professionals in the shortest possible time-frame and made their helpline live in 3 days. Meanwhile, in response, Ringing Bells is accusing Cyfuture for having failed to respond to the huge number of calls they received despite the claim that they hired 100 new people for the new project.
Cyfuture Founder and CEO Anuj Bairathi told PTI
We were always sceptical of Ringing Bells and their business model. After several rounds of discussions with their management team and when they showed us names of senior politicians visiting their launch event, we decided to take up their project. The first few days after the phone was unveiled, the call-centre number received lakhs of calls which were attended and promptly responded to and even Ringing Bells was happy with our services. However, when we started asking for our payments, which were to be made to us on a weekly basis, they started making false allegations and abruptly decided to terminate our services citing unsatisfactory services.This is a clear case of cheating, fraud and breach of contract. As per the contract, Ringing Bells had specifically assured us of a minimum lock-in period of one year and no termination before a year.
Cyfuture alleges that they have a one year contract with Ringing Bells with no termination before a year. Bairathi stated that Ringing Bells was to provide a 30 day notice-period and make all pending payments, as per their agreement, in the event of termination due to unsatisfactory services.
We had outsourced this job to Cyfuture BPO. Telecom companies confirmed that the helpline was receiving a volume of approximately 12 lakh calls per hour. It came to our knowledge that the BPO company was not able to handle the traffic. We are looking into the situation to serve our customers better.
Just yesterday, Ringing Bells announced cash on delivery for Freedom 251 orders. Earlier this week Ringing Bells answered some questions raised by the media and customers.