Effective 15th of September, any reload coupon that you buy for your prepaid number will be taxed 6%. If you are a prepaid user, you will be getting a SMS about this anytime from your telco.

The 6% tax is also applicable for new starter packs. That is a sad case because the call charges (generally) on prepaid is already more expensive than postpaid. All this while, I thought that we were already taxed and that is why the call charges are higher on prepaid numbers. Unfortunately, I was wrong. All this while, our telcos were absorbing the cost (tax charges) ever since the prepaid system was first introduced in the year 1998. Because the tax percentage was increased from 5% to 6% recently, the telcos has decided to push all 6% to us now.

Having 2 prepaid numbers myself, I am a bit reluctant to pay for tax and at the same time, also spend more on call charges. Anyway, nothing can be done on this matter.

Now, how does the tax works? If you are buying a reload coupon worth RM10, you will actually be paying RM10.60 instead. If it is a reload coupon worth RM30, you will be paying RM31.80.

Some of the telco e.g. Hotlink and DiGi have already announced this at their website. Other telcos will announce this at their site shortly.

I wanted to buy a bunch of reload coupons now and keep it for future use. By that way, there will be no tax that I need to pay for some time. Unfortunately, that will be quite risky. There were a lot of cases where people unable to top up because someone else already used the top up code (someone e.g. like a ‘hacker’). I rather spend RM0.60 more than wasting few hundred Ringgit on unusable reload coupons. By the way, does that method even work in the 1st place? :p