The Lousy Polis Saman SMS System!

Received a letter from Traffic Division Bukit Aman today with the receiver is my brother. The letter is about an unpaid traffic summon reminder which was quite shocking as I didn't hear my brother mentioned about any summon before. So I called to notify him which himself was caught in surprise as well.

There was an instruction in the letter saying we can actually use SMS service to check for summon. I knew about this service but never try on it before. So I asked my brother to use the service to get the summon information. From what I read from the letter, I told him how was the SMS syntax should look like.

After he tried, there was no summon recorded on his name. As both of our name is just an alphabet difference, I started to suspect if they wrongly type the name on the letter. To play safe, I tried the SMS service to see if the summon was under by name. I followed the syntax "Polis Saman (IC Number / Car Plate number)" then sent to 32728.

However, I think it was a wrong syntax so the system returned a message to me and charge me RM0.50 for this (as shown in the picture below). In this message, an example of the syntax was given. It was actually far more easy!! Just "POLIS SAMAN" follow by car plate number you wish to check. It was definitely not as complicated as mentioned in the letter!

 

I sent again and this time the reply shocked me! It said that my car was having a summon cost RM100 and due on 11/12/09 which is today!!! Without much thinking, I rushed to police HQ tried to clear the summon.

After the police traffic on duty checked on his system, he told me there was no record of summon under my name! WTF???!! I told him the situation and he offered to check the record for my brother. After checking, it was confirmed that there was an overdue summon belongs to my brother!

Can you see the lousiness of the Polis Saman SMS system here? It just provided the wrong information yet charge RM0.50 for each SMS! In another word, we pay for the wrong information! I am not sure how frequent this happened but what is sure is that some enhancement or improvement should be taken immediately to the system.

Polis Saman SMS system is a widely use system in the country, thus lousy service like this should be avoided so that the public can use it with confident and sense of reliable. Wrong information will just bring more trouble for the general users who forced to pay for the service! This is definitely unreasonable!