A complaint of unfair trade practices was filed with the Bengaluru Urban District Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission at Shantinagar.
The Bengaluru city consumer court has ordered Apple India and its authorized service center located in Indiranagar to pay Rs 1 lakh as compensation to their customers after suing them, The Times of India reported. The compensation includes the price he paid for the purchase of the iPhone and the distress caused to him by Apple India.
In October 2021, Awez Khan bought the iPhone 13 which came with a one-year warranty. The phone’s battery and speaker of the brand-new phone stopped working properly and Khan submitted the phone to the iPlanet Care Center in Indiranagar. The service center staff called Khan a few days later to tell him that his phone was fine and asked him to collect it from the store. Khan reached the store and checked his phone, but the battery and speaker problems remained unchanged. He raised the issue with the staff and asked them to repair the phone properly.
Two weeks later, the service center staff reached out to him and said they had detected a sticky substance inside the phone. They also insisted that the problem was not covered under the warranty policy and that he would have to pay extra to get it fixed.
Khan took up the matter with Apple India through mail, but the tech giant reportedly did not get back to his complaint. He then decided to file a case against Apple India and sent them a legal notice. A complaint of unfair trade practices was filed by him with the Bangalore Urban District Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission, Shantinagar.
In its defence, Apple India’s counsel claimed that the complaint lacked facts and termed the damage as ‘accidental’. However, the court ordered the customer to pay ₹79,999 as compensation along with an additional ₹20,000 for the inconvenience caused.
