Straight Talk, Inc Deactivated my service and refused to reassign my old phone number Internet
My phone broke and while a new phone straight talk sent me was in transit I was unable to use my calling credit. No problems with that. The whole phone replacement took about 1.5 to 2 weeks. When I received my phone, I activated it following the instructions and, got the phone number I was previously using.
HERE'S THE PROBLEM. I usually had to refill by the 6th of every month, BUT, after I reactivated the phone I got a SMS from Straight Talk telling me that I had now to refill by April 28th. Fine. I attributed that to the fact that I did not use the service for about that period of time while the new phone was on its way.
HOWEVER, on April 7th the service was deactivated. I called their tech support and they told me not to worry since the only thing I had to do was to give her the PIN of a new activation card, and then call *22890 to activate the phone with my old phone number. BUT I received a different phone number. Then I called back and I was told that what I really had to do was to buy a new service card, deactivate my service, and then activate it with the old phone number. I refused to do this and the person told me to follow some steps to get the old phone number back. These instructions did not work.
I called back and was told twice it was MY fault for not refilling the account by the 7th, that the SMS was sent "by mistake", but that was still my fault because it was "commonsense" NOT to follow the instructions in the SMS.
As a result my number I had for years was deactivated and got screwed by these people.
1 Updates & Rebuttals
Frustrated customer
Pennsylvania,United States of America
Problem was solved after complaining to the Better Business Bureau
#2Author of original report
Wed, April 28, 2010
I complained to the Better Business Bureau about this. A few weeks after I filed the complain, a Tracfone representative contacted me by email and offered to solve the problem. Before this, however, I had received yet another SMS with a reminder for the WRONG date again!
Fortunately, Tracfone (Straight Talk's parent company) was able to get my phone number back from Verizon and as a courtesy they gave me a bit of more credit.
I'm still a bit frustrated that I had to change my number in a few places to reflect the new number, and then I have to change it back, but I guess it could have been worse.
What's is also frustrating is that I suggested to the customer service representative that told me that my number was lost forever that they could get it back from Verizon, but she all the time denied this and said that not even Verizon was now in charge of that number, while at the same time blaming me for all this problem. At the end, what I suggested was the right course of action that the Tracfone manager who got my number back followed.